

The 


PERFECT 


GENTLEMAN 




BY 


RALPH BERGENGREN 




Class 






Book ■ C <o^ '^4 - 
CoipglitN«___iJlJ_ «| 

COFmiGHT DEPOSm 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 



THE COMFORTS OF HOME 

A COMPANION VOLUME TO 

THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

containing other 
amusing essays on 

Thoughts While Getting Settled 

Praise of Open Fires 

Furnace and I 

No Stairs — No Attic 

Concerning Kitchens 

The Plumber Appreciated 

The Home of the Porcelain Tub 

At Home in the Guest Chamber 

BY 

RALPH BERGENGREN 

75 cents, postpaid 

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS 

boston 



Th. 



PERFECT GENTLEMAN 



BY 



RALPH BERGENGREN 




The Atlantic Monthly Press 
Boston 






^^". 

^ «^l* 



Copyright, 1919, by 
The Atlantic Monthly Press, Inc. 



r/f^ author gratefully acknowledges his indebted- 
ness to The Century Co. for permission to reprint 
"Oh, Shining Shoes! ' ' 



©CI.A535827 



(Ti 



— ^ 








CONTENTS 


The Perfect Gentleman ... i 


As a Man Dresses . 






14 


In the Chair 






. 28 


Oh, Shining Shoes! 






43 


On Making Calls . . . 






55 


The Lier in Bed 






67 


To Bore or Not to Bore 






79 


Where Toils the Tailor 






93 


Shaving Thoughts 






. 106 


Oh, The Afternoon Tea! 






122 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

SOMEWHERE in the back of every 
man's mind there dwells a strange 
wistful desire to be thought a Perfect 
Gentleman. And this is much to his 
credit, for the Perfect Gentleman, as 
thus wistfully contemplated, is a high 
ideal of human behavior, although, in 
the narrower but honest admiration of 
many, he is also a Perfect Ass. Thus, 
indeed, he comes down the centuries — 
a sort of Siamese Twins, each miracu- 
lously visible only to its own admirers; 
a worthy personage proceeding at one 
end of the connecting cartilage, and a 
popinjay prancing at the other. Emer- 
son was, and described, one twin when 
he wrote, 'The gentleman is a man of 
truth, lord of his own action^, and ex- 
pressing that lordship in his behavior; 

I 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

not in any manner dependent or servile, 
either on persons, or opinions, or pos- 
sessions.* Walter Pater, had Leonardo 
painted a Perfect Gentleman's portrait 
instead of a Perfect Lady's, might have 
described the other : * The presence that 
thus rose so strangely beside the tea- 
table is expressive of what in the ways 
of a thousand years women had come 
to desire. His is the head upon which 
"all the ends of the world have come," 
and the eyelids are a little weary. He is 
older than the tea things among which 
he sits.' Many have admired, but few 
have tried to imitate, the Perfect Gen- 
tleman of Emerson's definition; yet few 
there are who have not felt the wistful 
desire for resemblance. But the other is 
more objective: his clothes, his man- 
ners, and his habits are easy to imitate. 
Of this Perfect Gentleman in the 
eighteenth century I recently discov- 

2 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

ered fossil remains in the Gentleman^s 
Pocket Library (Boston and Philadel- 
phia, 1794), from which any literary- 
savant may restore the original. All in 
one volume, the Library is a compila- 
tion for Perfect Gentlemen in the shell, 
especially helpful with its chapter on 
the * Principles of Politeness' ; and many 
an honest but foolish youth went about, 
I dare say, with this treasure distend- 
ing his pocket, bravely hoping to be- 
come a Perfect Gentleman by sheer dili- 
gence of spare-time study. If by chance 
this earnest student met an acquaint- 
ance who had recently become engaged, 
he would remember the * distinguishing 
diction that marks the man of fashion,' 
and would 'advance with warmth and 
cheerfulness, and perhaps squeezing him 
by the hand' (oh, horror!) 'would say, 
" Believe me, my dear sir, I have scarce 
words to express the joy I feel, upon 

3 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

your happy alliance with such and such 
a family, etc.'" Of which distinguish- 
ing diction, ' believe me ' is now all that 
is left. 

If, however, he knew that the ap- 
proaching victim had been lately be- 
reaved, he would 'advance slower, and 
with a peculiar composure of voice and 
countenance, begin his compliments of 
condolence with, "I hope, sir, you will 
do me the justice to be persuaded, that 
I am not insensible to your unhappi- 
ness, that I take part in your distress, 
and shall ever be affected when you are 
so.'" 

In lighter mood this still imperfect 
Perfect Gentleman would never allow 
himself to laugh, knowing, on the word 
of his constant pocket-companion, that 
laughter is the 'sure sign of a weak 
mind, and the manner in which low- 
bred men express their silly joy, at silly 

4 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

things, and they call it being merry.* 
Better always, if necessary, the peculiar 
composure of polite sensibility to the 
suffering of properly introduced ac- 
quaintances. When he went out, he 
would be careful to 'walk well, wear his 
hat well, move his head properly, and 
his arms gracefully ' ; and I for one sym- 
pathize with the low-breds if they found 
him a merry spectacle; when he went 
in, he would remember pertinently that 
' a well-bred man is known by his man- 
ner of sitting.' ' Easy in every position,' 
say the Principles of Politeness, ' instead 
of lolling or lounging as he sits, he leans 
with elegance, and by varying his atti- 
tudes, shows that he has been used to 
good company.' Good company, one 
judges, must have inclined to be rather 
acrobatic. 

Now, in the seventeen-nineties there 
were doubtless purchasers for the Gen- 

5 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

tleman's Pocket Library: the desire to 
become a Perfect Gentleman (like this 
one) by home study evidently existed. 
But, although I am probably the only 
person who has read that instructive 
book for a very long time, it remains 
to-day the latest complete work which 
any young man wishing to become a 
Perfect Gentleman can find to study. 
Is it possible, I ask myself, that none 
but burglars any longer entertain this 
ambition? I can hardly believe it. Yet 
the fact stands out that, in an age 
truly remarkable for its opportunities 
for self-improvement, there is nothing 
later than 1794 to which I can commend 
a crude but determined inquirer. To 
my profound astonishment I find that 
the Correspondence-School system of- 
fers no course; to my despair I search 
the magazines for graphic illustration 
of an Obvious Society Leader confid- 

6 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

ing to an Obvious Scrubwoman: 'Six 
months ago my husband was no more a 
Perfect Gentleman than yours, but one 
day I persuaded him to mark that cou- 
pon, and all our social prominence and 
eclat we owe to that school.' 

One may say, indeed, that here is 
something which cannot conceivably be 
described as a job ; but all the more does 
it seem, logically, that the correspon- 
dence schools must be daily creating 
candidates for what naturally would be 
a post-graduate course. One would im- 
agine that a mere announcement would 
be sufficient, and that from all the finan- 
cial and industrial centres of the coun- 
try students would come flocking back 
to college in the next mail. 

Be a Perfect Gentleman 

In the Bank — at the Board of Directors 
— putting through that New Railroad 

7 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

in Alaska — wherever you are and 
whatever you are doing to drag down 
the Big Money — would n 't you feel 
more at ease if you knew you were be- 
having like a Perfect Gentleman? 
We will teach YOU how. 

Some fifty odd years ago Mr. George 
H. Calvert (whom I am pained to find 
recorded in the Dictionary of American 
Authors as one who 'published a great 
number of volumes of verse that was 
never mistaken for poetry by any read- 
er') wrote a small book about gentle- 
men, fortunately in prose and not meant 
for beginners, in which he cited Bayard, 
Sir Philip Sidney, Charles Lamb, Bru- 
tus, St. Paul, and Socrates as notable 
examples. Perfect Gentlemen all, as 
Emerson would agree, I question if any 
of them ever gave a moment's thought 
to his manner of sitting; yet any two, 
sitting together, would have recognized 

8 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

each other as Perfect Gentlemen at 
once and thought no more about it. 

These are the standard, true to Em- 
erson's definition ; and yet such shining 
examples need not discourage the rest 
of us. The qualities that made them 
gentlemen are not necessarily the qual- 
ities that made them famous. One need 
not be as polished as Sidney, but one 
must not scratch. One need not have 
a mind like Socrates : a gentleman may 
be reasonably perfect, — and surely this 
is not asking too much, — with mind 
enough to follow this essay. Brutus 
gained nothing as a gentleman by as- 
sisting at the assassination of Caesar 
(who was no more a gentleman, by the 
way, in Mr. Calvert's opinion, than 
was Mr. Calvert a poet in that of the 
Dictionary of Authors). 

As for Fame, it is quite sufficient — 
and this only out of gentlemanly con- 

9 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

sideratlon for the convenience of others 

— for a Perfect Gentleman to have his 
name printed in the Telephone Direc- 
tory. And in this higher definition I 
go so far as to think that the man is 
rare who is not sometimes a Perfect 
Gentleman, and equally uncommon 
who never is anything else. Adam I hail 
a Perfect Gentleman when, seeing what 
his wife had done, he bit back the bitter 
words he might have said, and then — 
he too — took a bite of the apple : but 
oh! how far he fell immediately after- 
ward, when he stammered his pitiable 
explanation that the woman tempted 
him and he did eat! Bayard, Sir Philip 
vSidney, Charles Lamb, St. Paul, or Soc- 
rates would have insisted, and stuck to 
it, that he hit it first. 

I have so far left out of consideration 

— as for that matter did the author and 
editor of the Pocket Library (not wish- 

10 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

ing to discourage students) — a qual- 
ification essential to the Perfect Gen- 
tleman in the eighteenth century. He 
must have had — what no book could 
give him — an ancestor who knew how 
to sit. Men there were whose social 
status was visibly signified by the ab- 
breviation 'Gent.' appended to their 
surnames. But already this was becom- 
ing a vermiform appendix, and the nine- 
teenth century did away with it. This 
handsome abbreviation created an invi- 
dious distinction between citizens which 
democracy refused longer to counte- 
nance; and, much as a Lenin would de- 
stroy the value of money in Russia by 
printing countless rouble notes without 
financial backing, so democracy de- 
stroyed the distinctive value of the word 
'gentleman' by applying it indiscrimi- 
nately to the entire male population of 
the United States. 

II 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

The gentleman continues in various 
degrees of perfection. There is no other 
name for him, but one hears it rarely; 
yet the shining virtue of democratiza- 
tion is that it has produced a kind of 
tacit agreement with Chaucer's Parson 
that 'to have pride in the gentrie of 
the bodie is right gret folic; for oft- 
time the gentrie of the bodie benim- 
eth the gentrie of the soul ; and also we 
be all of one fader and one moder.' And 
although there are few men nowadays 
who would insist that they are gentle- 
men, there is probably no man living 
in the United States who would admit 
that he is n't. 

And so I now see that my bright 
dream of a Correspondence-School post- 
graduate course cannot be realized. No 
bank president, no corporation direc- 
tor, electrical engineer, advertising ex- 
pert, architect, or other distinguished 

12 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

alumnus would confess himself no gen- 
tleman by marking that coupon. The 
suggestion would be an insult, were it 
affectionately made by the good old 
president of his Alma Mater in a per- 
sonal letter. A few decorative cards, to 
be hung up in the office, might perhaps 
be printed and mailed at graduation. 

A bath every day 

Is the Gentleman's way. 

Don't break the Ten Commandments — 
Moses meant YOU! 

Dress Well — Behave Better. 

A Perfect Gentleman has a Good Heart, 

a Good Head, a Good Wardrobe, 

and a Good Conscience. 



AS A MAN DRESSES 

AT some time or other, I dare say, it 
is common experience for a man 
to feel indignant at the necessity of 
dressing himself. He wakes in the morn- 
ing. Refreshed with sleep, ready and 
eager for his daily tasks and pleasures, 
he is just about to leap out of bed when 
the thought confronts him that he must 
put on his clothes. His leap is postponed 
indefinitely, and he gets up with custo- 
mary reluctance. One after another, 
twelve articles — eleven, if two are 
joined in union one and inseparable — 
must be buttoned, tied, laced, and pos- 
sibly safety-pinned to his person : a rou- 
tine business, dull, wearisome with rep- 
etition. His face and hands must be 
washed, his hair and teeth brushed: 
many, indeed, will perform all over 

14 



AS A MAN DRESSES 

what Keats, thinking of the ocean eter- 
nally washing the land, has called a 
' priestlike task of pure ablution' ; but 
others, faithful to tradition and Satur- 
day night, will dodge this as wasteful. 
Downstairs in summer is his hat; in win- 
ter, his hat, his overcoat, his muffler, 
and, if the weather compels, his gal- 
oshes and perhaps his ear-muflfs or ear- 
bobs. Last thing of all, the Perfect 
Gentleman will put on his walking- 
stick; somewhere in this routine he will 
have shaved and powdered, buckled his 
wrist- watch, and adjusted his spats. 

When we think of the shortness of 
life, and how, even so, we might im- 
prove our minds by study between get- 
ting up and breakfast, dressing, as edu- 
cators are beginning to say of the long 
summer vacation, seems a sheer 'wast- 
age of education ' ; yet the plain truth is 
that we would n't get up. Better, if we 

15 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

can, to think while we dress, pausing to 
jot down our worth-while thoughts on 
a handy tablet. Once, I remember, — 
and perhaps the pleasant custom con- 
tinues, — a lady might modestly ex- 
press her kindly feeling for a gentleman 
(and her shy, half-humorous recogni- 
tion of the difference between them) by 
giving him shaving-paper; why not a 
somewhat similar tablet, to record his 
dressing- though ts ? 

'Clothes,' so wrote Master Thomas 
Fuller, — and likely enough the idea 
occurred to him some morning while 
getting into his hose and doublet, — 
' ought to be our remembrancers of our 
lost innocency.' And so they are; for 
Adam must have bounded from bed to 
breakfast with an innocency that nowa- 
days we can only envy. 

Yet, in sober earnest, the first useful 
thing that ever this naked fellow set his 

i6 



AS A MAN DRESSES 

hand to was the making of his own 
apron. The world, as we know and love 
it, began — your pardon, Mr. Kipling, 
but I cannot help it — when 

Cross-legged our Father Adam sat and fastened 
them one by one, 

Till, leaf by leaf, with loving care he got his 
apron done; 

The first new suit the world had seen, and might- 
ily pleased with it, 

Till the Devil chuckled behind the Tree, 'It's 
pretty, but will it fit? ' 

From that historic moment everything 
a man does has been preceded by dress- 
ing, and almost immediately the proc- 
ess lost its convenient simplicity. Not 
since Adam's apron has any complete 
garment, or practical suit of clothes, 
been devised — except for sea-bathing 
— that a busy man could slip on in the 
morning and off again at night. All our 
indignation to the contrary, we prefer 
the complicated and difficult : we enjoy 

17 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

our buttons; we are withheld only by 
our queer sex-pride from wearing gar- 
ments that button up in the back — in- 
deed, on what we frankly call our 'best 
clothes,' we have the buttons though we 
dare not button with them. The one cos- 
tume that a man could slip on at night 
and off again in the morning has never, 
if he could help it, been worn in gen- 
eral society, and is now outmoded by a 
pretty little coat and pantaloons of soft 
material and becoming color. We come 
undressed; but behold! thousands of 
years before we were born, it was de- 
cided that we must be dressed as soon 
as possible afterward, and clothes were 
made for us while it was yet in doubt 
whether we would be a little gentleman 
or a little lady. And so a man's first 
clothes are cunningly fashioned to do 
for either; worse still, — a crying in- 
dignity that, oh, thank Heaven, he can- 

i8 



AS A MAN DRESSES 

not remember in maturity, — he is for- 
cibly valeted by a woman, very likely 
young and attractive, to whom he has 
never been formally introduced. 

But with this nameless, speechless, 
and almost invertebrate thing that he 
once was — this little kicking Maeter- 
linck (if I may so call it) between the 
known and the unknown worlds — the 
mature self-dresser will hardly concern 
himself. Rather, it may be, will he con- 
template the amazing revolution which, 
in hardly more than a quarter-century, 
has reversed public opinion, and created 
a free nation which, no longer regarding 
a best-dresser with fine democratic con- 
tempt, now seeks, with fine democratic 
unanimity, to be a best-dresser itself. 
Or perhaps, smiling, he will recall Dr. 
Jaeger, that brave and lonely spirit who 
sought to persuade us that no other 
garment is so comfortable, so hygienic, 

19 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

so convenient, and so becoming to all 
figures, as the iinion suit — and that 
it should be worn externally, with cer- 
tain modifications to avoid arrest. His 
photograph, thus attired, is stamped 
on memory: a sensible, bearded gentle- 
man, inclining to stoutness, comfort- 
ably dressed in eye-glasses and a modi- 
fied union suit. And then, almost at the 
same moment, the Clothing Industry, 
perhaps inspired by the doctor's cour- 
age and informed by his failure, started 
the revolution, since crowned by criti- 
cal opinion, in a Sunday newspaper, 
that 'The American man, considering 
him in all the classes that constitute 
American society, is to-day the best- 
dressed, best-kept man in the world.' 

Forty or fifty years ago no newspaper 
could plausibly have made that state- 
ment, and, if it had, its office would 
probably have been wrecked by a mob 

20 



AS A MAN DRESSES 

of insulted citizens; but the Clothing 
Industry knew us better than Dr. Jae- 
ger, better even than we knew our- 
selves. Its ideal picture of a handsome, 
snappy young fellow, madly enjoying 
himself in exquisitely fitting, ready-to- 
wear clothes, stirred imaginations that 
had been cold and unresponsive to the 
doctor's photograph. We admired the 
doctor for his courage, but we admired 
the handsome, snappy young fellow for 
his looks; nay, more, we jumped in mul- 
titudes to the conclusion, which has 
since been partly borne out, that ready- 
to-wear clothes would make us all look 
like him. And so, in all the classes that 
constitute American society (which I 
take to include everybody who wears 
a collar), the art of dressing, formerly 
restricted to the few, became popular 
with the many. Other important and 
necessary industries — the hatters, the 

21 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

shoemakers, the shirtmakers, the cra- 
vatters, the hosiers, even the makers of 
underwear — hurried out of hiding ; and 
soon, whoever had eyes to look could 
study that handsome, snappy young 
fellow in every stage of costume, — for 
the soap-makers also saw their oppor- 
tunity, — from the bath up. 

The tailor survived, thanks probably 
to the inevitable presence of Doubting 
Thomas in any new movement; but he, 
too, has at last seen the light. I read 
quite recently his announcement that 
in 1 91 9 men's clothes would be 'spright- 
ly without conspicuousness ; dashing 
without verging on extremes; youth- 
ful in temperament and inspirational.' 
Some of us, it appears, remain self-con- 
scious and a little afraid to snap; and 
there the tailor catches us with his 
cunningly conceived ' sprightly without 
conspicuousness.' Unlike the vers-lihre 

22 



AS A MAN DRESSES 

poetess who would fain ' go naked in the 
street and walk unclothed into people's 
parlors,' — leaving, one imagines, an 
idle but deeply interested gathering on 
the sidewalk, — we are timid about ex- 
tremes. We wish to dash — but within 
reasonable limits. Nor, without forcing 
the note, would we willingly miss an 
opportunity to inspire others, or com- 
mit the affectation of concealing a still 
youthful temperament. 

A thought for the tablet: As a man 
dresses, so he is. 

Thirty or forty years ago there were 
born, and lived in a popular magazine, 
two gentlemen-heroes whose perfect 
friendship was unmarred by rivalry be- 
cause, like Rosencranz and Guilden- 
stern, they were of such different but 
equally engaging types of manly beau- 
ty. I forget whether they married sis- 
ters, but they live on in the memory as 

23 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

ornamental symbols of a vanished past 
— a day when fiction-writers impressed 
it, on their readers with every means at 
their command, that a hero was well- 
dressed, well- washed, and well-groomed. 
Such details have become unnecessary, 
and grumpy stand-patters no longer 
contemptuously mutter, 'Soap! Soap!' 
when a hero comes down to breakfast. 
Some of our older politicians, to be sure, 
still wear a standard costume of Prince 
Albert coat, pants (for so one must call 
them) that bag at the knee, and an im- 
personal kind of black necktie, sleeping, 
I dare say, in what used jocularly to 
be called a 'nightie'; but our younger 
leaders go appropriately clad, to the 
eye, in exquisitely fitting, ready-to-wear 
clothes. So, too, does the Correspond- 
ence-School graduate, rising like an 
escaped balloon from his once precari- 
ous place among the untrained workers 

24 



AS A MAN DRESSES 

to the comfortable security of general 
manager. Here and there, an echo of 
the past, persists the pretence that men 
are superior to any but practical con- 
siderations in respect to clothing; but 
if this were so, I need hardly point out 
that more would dress like Dr. Jaeger, 
and few waste precious moments fuss- 
ing over the selection of prettily colored 
ribbons to wear round their necks. 

Fortunately we need no valets, and 
a democracy of best-dressers is neither 
more nor less democratic than one of 
shirt-sleeves: the important thing in 
both cases is that the great majority of 
citizens all look alike. The alarm-clock 
awakens us, less politely than a James 
or Joseph, but we need never suspect 
it of uncomplimentary mental reserva- 
tions, and neither its appetite nor its 
morals cause us uneasiness. Fellow-citi- 
zens of Greek extraction maintain par- 

25 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

lors where we may sit, like so many stat- 
ues on the Parthenon, while they polish 
our shoes. In all large cities are quiet 
retreats where it is quite conventional, 
and even degage, for the most Perfect 
Gentleman to wait in what still remains 
to him, while an obliging fellow creature 
swiftly presses his trousers; or, lacking 
this convenient retreat, there are shrewd 
inventions that crease while we sleep. 
Hangers, simulating our own breadth 
of shoulders, wear our coats and pre- 
serve their shape. Wooden feet, simu- 
lating our own honest trotters, wear 
our shoes and keep them from wrink- 
ling. No valet could do more. And as 
for laying out our clothes, has not the 
kind Clothing Industry provided handy 
manuals of instruction? With their as- 
sistance any man can lay out the gar- 
ments proper to any function, be it a 
morning dig in the garden, a noon wed- 

26 



AS A MAN DRESSES 

ding at the White House, or (if you can 
conceive it) a midnight supper with 
Mrs. Carrie Nation. 

And yet — sometimes, that indigna- 
tion we feel at having to dress ourselves 
in the morning, we feel again at having 
to undress ourselves at night. Then in- 
deed are our clothes a remembrancer of 
our lost innocency. We think only of 
Adam going to bed. We forget that, 
properly speaking, poor innocent Adam 
had no bed to go to. And we forget also 
that in all the joys of Eden was none 
more innocent than ours when we have 
just put on a new suit. 



IN THE CHAIR 

ABOUT once in so often a man 
must go to the barber for what, 
with contemptuous brevity, is called a 
haircut. He must sit in a big chair, 
a voluminous bib (prettily decorated 
with polka dots) tucked in round his 
neck, and let another human being cut 
his hair for him. His head, with all its 
internal mystery and wealth of thought, 
becomes for the time being a mere poll, 
worth two dollars a year to the tax- 
assessor: an irregularly shaped object, 
between a summer squash and a can- 
taloupe, with too much hair on it, as 
very likely several friends have advised 
him. His identity vanishes. 

As a rule, the less he now says or 
thinks about his head, the better: he has 
given it to the barber, and the barber 

28 



IN THE CHAIR 

will do as he pleases with it. It is only 
when the man is little and is brought in 
by his mother, that the job will be done 
according to instructions; and this is 
because the man's mother is in a posi- 
tion to see the back of his head. Also 
because the weakest woman under such 
circumstances has strong convictions. 
When the man is older the barber will 
sometimes allow him to see the hair- 
cut cleverly reflected in two mirrors; 
but not one man in a thousand — nay, 
in ten thousand — would dare express 
himself as dissatisfied. After all, what 
does he know of haircuts, he who is no 
barber? Women feel differently; and I 
know of one man who, returning home 
with a new haircut, was compelled to 
turn round again and take wh^t his 
wife called his 'poor' head to another 
barber by whom the haircut was more 
happily finished. But that was excep- 

29 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

tional. And it happened to that man 
but once. 

The very word 'haircut' is objec- 
tionable. It snips Hke the scissors. Yet 
it describes the operation more honest- 
ly than the substitute 'trim,' a euphe- 
mism that indicates a jaunty habit of 
dropping in frequently at the barber's 
and so keeping the hair perpetually at 
just the length that is most becoming. 
For most men, although the knowledge 
must be gathered by keen, patient ob- 
servation and never by honest confes- 
sion, there is a period, lasting about a 
week, when the length of their hair is 
admirable. But it comes between hair- 
cuts. The haircut itself is never satis- 
factory. If his hair was too long before 
(and on this point he has the evi- 
dence of unprejudiced witnesses), it is 
too short now. It must grow steadily 
— count on it for that ! — until for a 

30 



IN THE CHAIR 

brief period it is 'just right,' aestheti- 
cally suited to the contour of his face 
and the cut of his features, and begin- 
ning already imperceptibly to grow too 
long again. 

Soon this growth becomes visible, 
and the man begins to worry. ' I must 
go to the barber,' he says in a harassed 
way. 'I must get a haircut.' But the 
days pass. It is always to-morrow, and 
to-morrow, and to-morrow. When he 
goes, he goes suddenly. 

There is something within us, prob- 
ably our immortal soul, that postpones 
a haircut; and yet in the end our im- 
mortal souls have little to do with the 
actual process. It is impossible to con- 
ceive of one immortal soul cutting an- 
other immortal soul's hair. My own 
soul, I am sure, has never entered a 
barber's shop. It stops and waits for 
me at the portal. Probably it converses, 

31 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

on subjects remote from our bodily con- 
sciousness, with the immortal souls of 
barbers, patiently waiting until the 
barbers finish their morning's work and 
come out to lunch. 

Even during the haircut our hair is 
still growing, never stopping, never at 
rest, never in a hurry : it grows while we 
sleep, as was proved by Rip Van Winkle. 
And yet perhaps sometimes it is in a 
hurry; perhaps that is why it falls out. 
In rare cases the contagion of speed 
spreads; the last hair hurries after all 
the others; the man is emancipated 
from dependence on barbers. I know 
a barber who is in this independent 
condition himself (for the barber can 
no more cut his own hair than the rest 
of us) and yet sells his customers a pre- 
paration warranted to keep them from 
attaining it: a seeming anomaly which 
can be explained only on the ground 

32 



IN THE CHAIR 

that business is business. To escape 
the haircut one must be quite without 
hair that one cannot see and reach ; and 
herein possibly is the reason for a fash- 
ion which has often perplexed students 
of the Norman Conquest. The Norman 
soldiery wore no hair on the backs of 
their heads; and each brave fellow could 
sit down in front of his polished shield 
and cut his own hair without much 
trouble. But the scheme had a weak- 
ness; the back of the head had to be 
shaved ; and the fashion doubtless went 
out because, after all, nothing was 
gained by it. One simply turned over 
on one's face in the barber's chair in- 
stead of sitting up straight. 

Fortunately we begin having a hair- 
cut when we are too young to think, 
and when also the process is sugar- 
coated by the knowledge that we are 
losing our curls. Then habit accustoms 

33 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

us to it. Yet it is significant that men 
of refinement seek the barber in se- 
cluded places, basements of hotels for 
choice, where they can be seen only by 
barbers and by other refined men hav- 
ing or about to have haircuts; and that 
men of less refinement submit to the 
operation where every passer-by can 
stare in and see them, bibs round their 
necks and their shorn locks lying in 
pathetic little heaps on the floor. There 
is a barber's shop of this kind in Boston 
where one of the barbers, having no 
head to play with, plays on a cornet, 
doubtless to the further distress of his 
immortal soul peeping in through the 
window. But this is unusual even in 
the city that is known far and wide as 
the home of the Boston Symphony 
Orchestra. 

I remember a barber — he was the 
only one available in a small town — 

34 



IN THE CHAIR 

who cut my left ear. The deed dis- 
tressed him, and he told me a story. It 
was a pretty little cut, he said, — fill- 
ing it with alum, — and reminded him 
of another gentleman whose left ear 
he had nipped in identically the same 
place. He had done his best with alum 
and apology, as he was now doing. Two 
months later the gentleman came in 
again. 'And by golly!' said the bar- 
ber, with a kind of wonder at his own 
cleverness, 'if I didn't nip him again 
in just the same place!' 

A man can shave himself. The Arm- 
less Wonder does it in the Dime Mu- 
seum. Byron did it, and composed 
poetry during the operation; although, 
as I have recently seen scientifically ex- 
plained, the facility of composition was 
not due to the act of shaving but to 
the normal activity of the human mind 
at that time in the morning. Here, 

35 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

therefore, a man can refuse the offices 
of the barber. If he wishes to make one 
of a half-dozen apparently inanimate 
figures, their faces covered with soap, 
and their noses used as convenient 
handles to turn first one cheek and 
then the other — that is his own look- 
out. But human ingenuity has yet to 
invent a 'safety barber's shears.' It 
has tried. A near genius once invented 
an apparatus — a kind of helmet with 
multitudinous little scissors inside it 
— which he hopefully believed would 
solve the problem ; but what became of 
him and his invention I have not heard. 
Perhaps he tried it himself and slunk, 
defeated, into a deeper obscurity. Per- 
haps he committed suicide ; for one can 
easily imagine that a man who thought 
he had found a way to cut his own hair 
and then found that he had n't, would 
be thrown into a suicidal depression. 

36 



IN THE CHAIR 

There is the possibility that he suc- 
ceeded in cutting his own hair, and was 
immediately 'put away,' by his sensi- 
tive family where nobody could see him 
but the hardened attendants. The im- 
portant fact is that the invention never 
got on the market. Until some other 
investigator succeeds to more practical 
purpose, the rest of us must go periodi- 
cally to the barber. We must put on 
the bib — 

Here, however, there is at least an 
opportunity of selection. There are 
bibs with arms, and bibs without arms. 
And there is a certain amount of satis- 
faction in being able to see our own 
hands, carefully holding the newspaper 
or periodical wherewith we pretend that 
we are still intelligent human beings. 
And here again are distinctions. The 
patrons of my own favored barber's 
shop have arms to their bibs and pre- 

37 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

tend to be deeply interested in the Illus- 
trated London News. The patrons of the 
barber's shop where I lost part of my 
ear — I cannot see the place, but those 
whom I take into my confidence tell 
me that it has long since grown again 

— had no sleeves to their bibs, but 
nevertheless managed awkwardly to 
hold the Police Gazette. And this oppor- 
tunity to hold the Police Gazette with- 
out attracting attention becomes a 
pleasant feature of this type of barber's 
shop: I, for example, found it easier 

— until my ear was cut — to forget 
my position in the examination of this 
journal than in the examination of the 
Illustrated London News. The pictures, 
strictly speaking, are not so good, either 
artistically or morally, but there is a 
tang about them, an I-do-not-know- 
what. And it is always wisest to focus 
attention on some such extraneous in- 

38 



IN THE CHAIR 

terest. Otherwise you may get to 
looking in the mirror. 

Do not do that. 

For one thing, there is the impulse 
to cry out, 'Stop! Stop! Don't cut it 
all off! 

*0h, barber, spare that hair! 

Leave some upon my brow! 
For months it *s sheltered me ! 

And I'll protect it now! 

'Oh, please! P-1-e-a-s-e! — ' 

These exclamations annoy a barber, 
rouse a demon of fury in him. He 
reaches for a machine called 'clippers.' 
Tell him how to cut hair, will you! A 
little more and he'll shave your head — 
and not only half-way either, like the 
Norman soldiery at the time of the Con- 
quest ! Even if you are able to restrain 
this impulse, clenching your bib in your 
hands and perhaps dropping or tearing 
the Illustrated London News, the mirror 

39 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

gives you strange, morbid reflections. 
You recognize your face, but your head 
seems somehow separate, balanced on 
a kind of polka-dotted mountain with 
two hands holding the Illustrated Lon- 
don News. You are afraid momentarily 
that the barber will lift it off and go 
away with it. 

Then is the time to read furiously the 
weekly contribution of G. K. Chester- 
ton. But your mind reverts to a story 
you have been reading about how 
the Tulululu islanders, a savage but 
ingenious people, preserve the heads of 
their enemies so that the faces are much 
smaller but otherwise quite recogniz- 
able. You find yourself looking keenly 
at the barber to discover any possible 
trace of Tulululu ancestry. 

And what is he going to get now? 
A kris? No, a paint-brush. Is he going 
to paint you? And if so — what color? 

40 



IN THE CHAIR 

The question of color becomes strangely 
important, as if it made any real dif- 
ference. Green? Red? Purple? Blue? 
No, he uses the brush dry, tickling your 
forehead, tickling your ears, tickling 
your nose, tickling you under the chin 
and down the back of your neck. After 
the serious business of the haircut, a 
barber must have some relaxation. 

There is one point on which you are 
independent: you will not have the 
bay rum; you are a teetotaller. You 
say so in a weak voice which neverthe- 
less has some adamantine quality that 
impresses him. He humors you; or 
perhaps your preference appeals to his 
sense of business economy. 

He takes off your bib. 

From a row of chairs a man leaps to 
his feet, anxious to give his head to the 
barber. A boy hastily sweeps up the 
hair that was yours — already as re- 

41 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

mote from you as if it had belonged to 
the man who is always waiting, and 
whose name is Next. Oh, it is horrible 
— horrible — horrible ! 



OH, SHINING SHOES! 

IN a democracy it is fitting that a 
man should sit on a throne to have 
his shoes polished, or, to use a brighter, 
gayer word, shined. We are all kings, 
and this happy conceit of popular gov- 
ernment is nicely symbolized by being, 
for these shining moments, so many 
kings together, each on his similar 
throne and with a slave at his feet. 
The democratic idea suffers a little from 
the difficulty of realizing that the slave 
is also a king, yet gains a little from the 
fair custom of the livelier monarchs of 
turning from left foot to right and from 
right to left, so that, within human 
limits, neither shoe shall be undemo- 
cratically shined first. 

Nor is it uncommon for the kings on 
the thrones to be symbolically and in- 

43 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

expensively served by yet other sov- 
ereign servants. Newspapers in hand, 
they receive the reports of their lord 
high chancellors, digest the social gossip 
of their realm, review its crimes, politics, 
discoveries, and inventions, and are en- 
tertained by their jesters, who, I have 
it on the authority of a current adver- 
tisement, all democratically smoke the 
same kind of tobacco. 'You know 'em 
all, the great fun-makers of the daily 
press, agile-brained and nimble- witted, 
creators of world-famed characters who 
put laughter into life. Such live, virile 
humans as they must have a live, virile 
pipe-smoke.' There are, to be sure, some 
who find in this agile-brained and nim- 
ble-witted mirth an element of profound 
melancholy; it seems often a debased 
coin of humor, which rings false on the 
counter of intelligence; yet even at its 
worst it is far better than many of the 

44 



OH, SHINING SHOES! 

waggeries that once stirred laughter in 
mediaeval monarchs. The thought ren- 
ders them bearable, these live, virile 
humans, who only a few centuries ago 
would have been too handicapped by 
their refinement to compete successfully 
with contemporary humorists. 

But there are a good many of us, pos- 
sessors of patience, self-control, and a 
sponge in a bottle, who rarely enjoy this 
royal prerogative. We shine our own 
shoes. Alone, and , if one may argue from 
the particular to the general, simply 
dressed in the intermediate costume, 
more or less becoming, that is between 
getting up and going out, we wear a shoe 
on our left hand, and with the other 
manipulate the helpful sponge. Some- 
times, too anxious, it polka-dots our 
white garments, sometimes the floor; it 
is safe only in the bottle, and the wisest 
shiner will perhaps approach the job as 

45 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

an Adamite, bestriding, like a colossus, 
a wide-spread newspaper, and taking a 
bath afterward. Or it may be that in- 
stead of the bottle we have a little tin 
box, wedded to its cover, — how often 
have we not exclaimed between clenched 
teeth, ' What man hath joined together 
man can pull asunder ! ' — and contain- 
ing a kind of black mud, which we apply 
with an unfortunate rag or with a brush 
appropriately called the ' dauber.' Hav- 
ing daubed, we polish, breathing our 
precious breath on the luminous surface 
for even greater luminosity. The time 
is passing when we performed this task 
of pure lustration, as Keats might have 
called it, in the cellar or the back hall, 
more fully, but not completely, dressed, 
coatless, our waistcoats rakishly un- 
buttoned or vulgarly upstairs, our inno- 
cent trousers hanging on their gallowses, 
our shoes on our feet, and our physical 

46 



OH, SHINING SHOES! 

activity not altogether unlike that de- 
manded by a home-exerciser to reduce 
the abdomen. Men of girth have been 
advised to saw wood ; I wonder that they 
never have been advised to shine their 
own shoes — twenty-five times in the 
morning and twenty- five times just be- 
fore going to bed. 

My own observation, although not 
continuous enough to have scientific 
value, leads me to think that stout men 
are the more inveterate patrons of the 
shoe-blacking parlor, — Csesar should 
have run one, — and that the present 
popularity of the sponge in a bottle may 
derive from superfluous girth. Invented 
as a dainty toilet accessory for women, 
and at first regarded by men as effemin- 
ate, it is easy to see how insidiousl}^ the 
sponge in a bottle would have attracted 
a stout husband accustomed to shine 
his own shoes in the earlier contortion- 

47 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

ist manner. By degrees, first one stout 
husband and then another, men took to 
the bottle; the curse of effeminacy was 
lifted ; the habit grew on men of all sizes. 
It was not a perfect method, — it black- 
ed too many other things besides shoes, 
and provided an undesirable plaything 
for baby, — but it was a step forward. 
There was a refinement, a je ne sais 
quoi, an 'easier way,' about this sponge 
in a bottle; and, perhaps more than all, 
a delusive promise that the stuff would 
dry shiny without friction, which ap- 
pealed to the imagination. 

Then began to disappear a household 
familiar — that upholstered, deceptive, 
utilitarian hassock kind of thing which, 
when opened, revealed an iron foot- 
rest, a box of blacking, — I will not say 
how some moistened that blacking, but 
you and I, gentle reader, brought water 
in a crystal glass from the kitchen, — 

48 



OH, SHINING SHOES! 

and an ingenious tool which combined 
the offices of dauber and shiner, so that 
one never knew how to put it away right 
side up. This tool still exists, an honest, 
good-sized brush carrying a round baby 
brush pickaback; and I dare say an oc- 
casional old-fashioned gentleman shines 
his shoes with it; but in the broader 
sense of that pernicious and descriptive 
phrase it is no longer used * by the best 
people.* Of late, I am told by shopkeep- 
ers, the tin box with the pervicacious 
cover is becoming popular ; but I remain 
true to my sponge in a bottle ; for, unlike 
the leopard, I am able to change my 
spots. 

Looking along the ages from the van- 
tage of a throne in the shoe-blacking 
parlor, it is a matter of pleased wonder 
to observe what the mind has found to 
do with the feet ; nor is the late invention 
of shoe-polish (hardly earlier than the 

49 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

Declaration of Independence) the least 
surprising item. For the greater part of 
his journey man has gone about his busi- 
nesses in unshined footwear, beginning, 
it would appear, with a pair of foot-bags, 
or foot-purses, each containing a valu- 
able foot, and tied round the ankle. 
Thus we see him, far down the vista of 
time, a tiny figure stopping on his way 
to tie up his shoe-strings. Captivated 
with form and color, he exhausted his 
invention in shapes and materials be- 
fore ever he thought of polish: he cut 
his toes square; he cut his toes so long 
and pointed that he must needs tie them 
to his knee to keep from falling over 
them ; he wore soles without uppers, — 
alas! poor devil, how often in all ages 
has he approximated wearing uppers 
without soles ! — and he went in for top- 
boots splendidly belegged and coquet- 
tishly beautified with what, had he been 

50 



OH, SHINING SHOES! 

a lady, he might have described as an 
insertion of lace. At last came the boot- 
blacking parlor, late nineteenth century, 
commercial, practical, convenient, and 
an important factor in civic aesthetics. 
Not that the parlor is beautiful in itself. 
It is a cave without architectural pre- 
tensions, but it accomplishes unwit- 
tingly an important mission : it removes 
from public view the man who is hav- 
ing his shoes shined. 

You know him, as the advertisement 
says of the live, virile humans who must 
have the live, virile pipe-smoke ; but hap- 
pily you know him nowadays chiefly 
by effort of memory. Yet only a little 
while ago kindly, well-intentioned men 
thought nothing of having their shoes 
shined in the full glare of the sun. The 
man having his shoes shined was a 
common spectacle. He sat or stood 
where anybody might see him, almost 

51 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

as immobile as a cigar-store Indian and 
much less decorative, with a peripatetic 
shoeblack busy at his feet. His standing 
attitude was a little like Washington 
crossing the Delaware ; and when he sat 
down, he was not wholly unlike the pic- 
ture of Jupiter in Mr. Bulfinch's well- 
known Age of Fable. He had his shoes 
shined on the sidewalk, congesting 
traffic ; he had them shined in the park, 
with the birds singing ; wherever he had 
them shined, he was as lacking in self- 
consciousness as a baby sucking its 
thumb. Peripatetic shoeblacks pursued 
pedestrians, and no sensitive gentleman 
was safe from them merely because he 
had carefully and well shined his own 
shoes before he came out. But how 
rarely nowadays do we see this peri- 
patetic shoeblack! Soon he will be as 
extinct as the buffalo, and the shoe- 
blacking parlor is his Buffalo Bill. 

52 



OH, SHINING SHOES! 

In the shoe-blacking parlor we are all 
tarred with the same brush, all daubed 
with the same dauber; we have nothing, 
as the rather enigmatical phrase goes, 
on one another. Indeed, we hardly look 
at one another, and are as remote as 
strangers sitting side by side in a theatre. 
Individually, in a steady, subconscious 
way, I think we are all wondering how 
we are going to get down when the time 
comes. One will hop, like a great spar- 
row ; another will turn round and descend 
backward ; another will come down with 
an absent-minded little wave of the 
foot, as if he were quite used to having 
his shoes shined and already thinking 
of more serious business ; another — but 
this is sheer nervousness and lack of 
savoir-faire — will step off desperately, 
as if into an abyss, and come down with 
a thump. Sometimes, but rarely, a man 
will fall off. It is a throne — and per- 

53 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

haps this is true of all thrones — from 
which no altogether self-satisfactory 
descent is possible; and we all know it, 
sitting behind our newspapers, or star- 
ing down on decadent Greece shining 
at our feet, or examining with curious, 
furtive glances those calendars the femi- 
nine beauty of which seems peculiar to 
shoe-blacking parlors, and has some- 
times led us to wonder whether the late 
Mr. Comstock ever had his shoes shined. 
And now, behold! the slave-king at 
my feet has found a long, narrow strip 
of linen, not, I fear, antiseptic, but 
otherwise suggestive of a preparedness 
course in first aid to the injured. He 
breathes on my shoes (O unhygienic 
shoeblack !) , dulling them to make them 
brighter with his strip of linen. It is 
my notice to abdicate; he turns down 
the bottoms of my trousers. I do not 
know how I get down from the throne. 



ON MAKING CALLS 

I KNOW a boy who dislikes to make 
calls. Making a call, he says, is 
'just sitting on a chair.' 

I have had the same feeling, although 
I had never defined it so nicely. One 
'just sits on a chair' — precariously, 
yet with an odd sense of unhappy se- 
curity, of having grown to and become 
part of that chair, as if one dreaded to 
fall off, yet strongly suspected that any 
real effort to get up and go away would 
bring the chair up and away with him. 
He is, so to speak, like a barnacle on a 
rock in an ocean of conversation. He 
may exhibit unbarnacle-like activity, 
cross and uncross his legs, fold and un- 
fold his arms, twiddle his useful fingers, 
incline his tired head this way and that 
to relieve the strain on his neck, assume 

55 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

(like an actor) expressions of interest, 
amusement, surprise, pleasure, or what 
not. He may even speak or laugh. But 
he remains sitting on his chair. He is 
more and more certain that he cannot 
get up. 

He is unlike the bottoms of his own 
trousers. Calmly, quietly, and by im- 
perceptible degrees they get up. Higher 
and higher they ascend kneeward ; they 
have an ambition to achieve the waist. 
Every little while he must unostenta- 
tiously, and with an easy, careless, indif- 
ferent, well-bred, and even hlase gesture, 
manage to pull them down. 

I am referring, you understand, to 
the mature, married gentleman. Be- 
tween boyhood and maturity there is a 
period (without which there would be 
fewer marriages, and perhaps none at 
all) when a call is a personal adventure, 
and it often happens that the recipient 

56 



ON MAKING CALLS 

of the call, rather than the caller him- 
self, fears that somehow or other he 
and his chair have grown together. 
But my boy friend, as I think you will 
agree when you consider his situation, 
does not, strictly speaking, call: he is 
taken to call. And just so is it with 
the average mature, married gentleman ; 
the chief difference — and even this 
does not invariably hold good — is that 
he dresses himself. He has become part 
and parcel (particularly parcel) of a 
wise and necessary division of life in 
which the social end is taken over by a 
feminine partner. She is the expert. 
She knows when and where to call, 
what to say, and when to go home. 
Married, a gentleman has no further 
responsibilities in this business — ex- 
cept to come cheerfully and sit on his 
chair without wriggling. Sometimes, 
indeed, he takes a pleasure in it, but 

57 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

that is only when he has momentarily 
forgotten that he is making a call. These 
are his rewarding moments; and then, 
the first thing he knows, somebody is 
'making signs* that it is time to go 
home! 

The wise man, noticing these 'signs,' 
comes home. He stands not upon the 
order of his coming, but comes at once. 

A call, says Herbert Spencer, in his 
Principles of Sociology, is 'evidently a 
remote sequence of that system under 
which a subordinate ruler had from 
time to time to show loyalty to a chief 
ruler by presenting himself to do hom- 
age.' The idea is plausible: was it not 
for this very reason that Cleopatra gal- 
leyed down the Cydnus to call on An- 
tony, — a call that would probably have 
had a different effect on history if the 
lady had brought a husband, — and 
Sheba cameled across the desert to call 

58 



ON MAKING CALLS 

on Solomon? The creditor character 
of the visitation survives in the com- 
mon expression ' paying a call.' In both 
these cases, however, the calls took on 
a lighter and brighter aspect, a more 
reciprocally admiring and well-affected 
intimacy, than was strictly necessary 
to an act of political homage. One is, 
after all, human; and the absence of 
marital partners, whose presence is al- 
ways a little subduing, must be taken 
into consideration. ' But Solomon,' you 
say, 'Solomon?' Sir and madam, I 
rise to your question. In such a situ- 
ation a man with seven hundred wives 
is as good as a bachelor; and I think 
the fact that Solomon had seven hun- 
dred wives proves it. 

Later the Feudal System provided 
natural scope for innumerable calls of 
this nature; visits, as we should now 
term them, because it was customary 

59 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

for the callers to bring their nighties — 
or would have been if the callers had 
had any. The Dark Ages, curiously 
enough, lacked this garment of the dark. 
But it was only after the Feudal Period 
that the call, as we now know and prac- 
tise it, became a social custom ; and even 
to this day feudalism, in an attenuated 
form, rules society, and the call is often 
enough an act of homage to the supe- 
rior social chief. One might argue (ex- 
cept for the fact that Sheba gave as well 
as exhibited her treasurer to Solomon) 
that Mrs. Jones is but following historic 
precedent when she brings and exhibits 
Mr. Jones to Mrs. Smith. Or, again, it 
might be pointed out that both Cleo- 
patra and Sheba brought their slaves. 
There is, apparently, more than one 
sequence (as Mr. Spencer would say), 
but there is also a wide divergence from 
original type. Only partly and occa- 

60 



ON MAKING CALLS 

sionally an act of homage, the call has 
become, broadly speaking, a recogni- 
tion of exact social equality, as if the 
round, dignified American cheese in 
Grocer Brown's ice-box should receive 
and return a call from the round, digni- 
fied American cheese in Grocer Green's 
ice-box. 

And it has become divisible into as 
many varieties as Mr. Heinz's pickles. 
— The call friendly (' Let us go and call 
on the Smiths: I'd like to see them'); 
the call compulsory ('We really must 
make that call on the Smiths'); the 
call curious (* I wonder if it 's so, what 
I heard yesterday about the Smiths') ; 
the call convenient ('As we haven't 
anything better to do this evening, we 
might call on the Smiths); the call 
proud ('Suppose we get out the new 
motor, and run round to the Smiths') ; 
and so forth, and so forth. But, how- 

6i 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

ever we look at it, the call is dependent 
upon feminine initiative. Our mature 
married gentleman, unless he has had 
already a call to the ministry, has no 
call, socially speaking, to make calls. It 
is his wife's business. As British soldiers 
have grimly sung on their way to battle, 
* He's there because he's there, because 
he's there, because he's there.' But it 
is his plain duty to sit on his chair. I do 
not hold it legitimate in him to 'sneak 
off' with Mr. Smith — and smoke. 

Fortunately, however, once he is 
there, little else is expected of him — 
and nothing that a man should not be 
willing to do for his wife. A smile, an 
attentive manner, the general effect 
of having combed his hair and washed 
behind his ears, a word now and then 
to show that he is awake (I am as- 
suming that he controls the tendency 
to wriggle) — and no more is needed. 

62 



ON MAKING CALLS 

He is a lay figure, but not necessarily a 
lay figure of speech. 

Unless a man who is taken to call is 
of an abnormally lively conversational 
habit, quick to think of something that 
may pass for a contribution to current 
thought, and even quicker to get it 
out, he had best accept his position as 
merely decorative, and try to be as 
decorative as possible. He should be so 
quick that the first words of his sen- 
tence have leaped into life before he 
is himself aware of what is to come 
hurrying after them ; he may be so slow 
that the only sentence he has is still 
painfully climbing to the surface long 
after the proper time for its appearance 
has passed and been forgotten. Swallow 
it, my dear sir, swallow it. Silence, ac- 
companied by a wise, appreciative glance 
of the eye, is better; for a man who has 
mastered the art of the wise look does 

63 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

his wife credit, and is taken home from 
a call with his faculties unimpaired and 
his self-respect undiminished : he is the 
same man as when he was taken out. 
But not so the man who starts, hesitates, 
and stops, as if he actually said, 'Hold- 
on-there-I-Ve-got-a-fine-idea — but — 
er — on second thought — er — I — er 
— that is — I guess — er — it is n 't — 
worth hearing.' 

Such a man, I say, adds little to the 
pleasure of himself or the company; he 
attracts attention only to disappoint it: 
and others are kind as well as sensible 
to ignore him. He should have kept on 
rapidly and developed his fine idea to 
the bitter end. Nor is it wise to at- 
tempt to shine, to dazzle, to surprise 
with a clever epigram, thoughtfully 
composed and tested by imaginary 
utterance before an imaginary charmed 
circle while dressing; for nothing so 

64 



ON MAKING CALLS 

diminishes confidence in an epigram as 
successive failures to get it into cir- 
culation. In calling, one must jump 
on the train of thought as it speeds by 
a way station; and there is no happy 
mean between jumping on a passing 
train and standing still on the platform 
— except, as I have suggested, a pleas- 
ant wave of the hand as the train passes. 

'There are not many situations,' 
said Dr. Johnson, 'more incessantly 
uneasy than that in which the man is 
placed who is watching an opportunity 
to speak, without courage to take it 
when offered, and who, though he re- 
solves to give a specimen of his abili- 
ties, always finds some reason or other 
for delaying to the next minute.' 

I know that resolve; and yet how 
often have I, too, failed at the crucial 
moment to give the hoped-for specimen 
of my abilities! 'Not yet,' I have said 

65 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

to myself, 'not yet. The time is not 
ripe.' And so I have waited, incessantly 
uneasy, — as Dr. Johnson well puts it, 
— but always finding some reason or 
other to postpone the fireworks. I was 
beset by a kind of gross selfishness — an 
unwillingness to give anybody a speci- 
men of my abilities. Let them chatter! 
Little do they guess — and never will 
they know — the abilities sitting on 
this chair! Give them a specimen! Yet 
I must confess also that my specimen 
seemed somehow isolated and apart 
from my environment. It was all right 
in itself, but it needed a setting; it 
was like a button without a coat, like 
an eye without a face, like a kiss with- 
out a companion. 



THE LIER IN BED 

IF I had to get on with but one arti- 
cle of furniture, I think I would 
choose a bed. One could if necessary 
sit, eat, read, and write in the bed. In 
past time it has been a social centre : the 
hostess received in it, the guests sat 
on benches, and the most distinguished 
visitor sat on the foot of the bed. It 
combines the uses of all the other arti- 
cles in the '$198 de luxe special 4-room 
outfit' that I have seen advertised for 
the benefit of any newly married couple 
with twenty dollars of their own for the 
first payment. Very few houses, if any, 
nowadays are without furniture that 
nobody uses, chairs that nobody ever 
sits on, books that nobody ever reads, 
ornaments that nobody ever wants, pic- 
tures that nobody ever looks at; an ac- 
cumulation of unessential objects that 

67 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

does credit chiefly to the activity of 
manufacturers and merchants catering 
to our modern lust for unnecessary ex- 
penditure. Not so many centuries ago 
one or two books made quite a respec- 
table library; dining-room tables were 
real banqueting boards laid on trestles 
and taken away after the banquet ; one 
bench might well serve several Perfect 
Gentlemen to sit upon; and a chair of 
his own was the baron's privilege. To- 
day the $198 de luxe special 4-room 
outfit would feel naked and ashamed 
without its ' I Pedestal ' and * i Piece of 
Statuary.' Yet what on earth does a 
happy couple, bravely starting life with 
twenty dollars, want of a pedestal and a 
piece of statuary? And I notice also 
that the outfit — 'a complete home,' 
says the description — makes no provi- 
sion for a kitchen ; but perhaps they are 
no longer de luxe. 

68 



THE LIER IN BED 

It is Impossible, at this time, to re- 
cover with complete certainty the an- 
tiquity of the bed. We may presume 
that the Neanderthal man had a wife 
(as wives were then understood) and 
maintained a kind of housekeeping that 
may have gone no further than pawing 
some leaves together to sleep on; but 
this probably was a late development. 
Earlier we may imagine the wind blow- 
ing the autumn leaves together and a 
Neanderthal man lying down by chance 
on the pile. He found it pleasant, and, 
for a few thousand years, went out of 
his way to find piles of leaves to lie 
down on, until one day he hit upon the 
bright idea of piling the leaves together 
himself. Then for the first time a man 
had a bed. His sleep was localized; his 
pile of leaves, brought together by his 
own sedulous hands, became property. 
Monogamy was encouraged, and the 

69 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

idea of home came into being. Person- 
ally I have no doubt whatever that the 
man who made the first bed was so 
charmed with it that the practice of ly- 
ing in bed in the morning began imme- 
diately; and it is probably a conserva- 
tive statement that the later Pliocene 
era saw the custom well developed. 

One wonders what the Neanderthal 
man would have thought of a de luxe 
4-room outfit, or complete home, for 

$198. 

Even to-day, however, there are 
many fortunate persons who are never 
awakened by an alarm-clock — that 
watchman's rattle, as it were, of Police- 
man Day. The invention is compara- 
tively recent. Without trying to un- 
cover the identity of the inventor, and 
thus adding one more to the Who's 
Who of Pernicious Persons, we may 
assume that it belongs naturally to the 

70 



THE LIER IN BED 

age of small and cheap clocks which 
dawned only in the nineteenth century. 
Some desire for it existed earlier. The 
learned Mrs. Carter, said Dr. Johnson, 
' at a time when she was eager in study, 
did not awake as early as she wished, 
and she therefore had a contrivance 
that, at a certain hour, her chamber 
light should burn a string to which a 
heavy weight was suspended, which 
then fell with a sudden strong noise; 
this roused her from her sleep, and then 
she had no difficulty in getting up.' 

This device, we judge, was peculiar 
to Mrs. Carter, than whom a less eager 
student would have congratulated her- 
self that the sudden strong noise was 
over, and gone sweetly to sleep again. 
The venerable Bishop Ken, who be- 
lieved that a man ' should take no more 
sleep than he can take at once,' had no 
need of it. He got up, we are told, at 

71 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

one or two o'clock in the morning 'and 
sometimes earlier,' and played the lute 
before putting on his clothes. 

To me the interesting thing about 
these historic figures is that they got up 
with such elastic promptness, the one 
to study and the other to play the lute. 
The Bishop seems a shade the more 
eager; but there are details that Mrs. 
Carter would naturally have refrained 
from mentioning to Dr. Johnson, even 
at the brimming moment when he had 
just accepted her contribution to the 
Rambler. For most of us — or alarm- 
clocks would not be made to ring con- 
tinuously until the harassed bed-warm- 
er gets up and stops the racket — this 
getting out of bed is no such easy mat- 
ter; and perhaps it will be the same 
when Gabriel's trumpet is the alarm- 
clock. We are more like Boswell, hon- 
est sleeper, and have ' thought of a pul- 

72 



THE LIER IN BED 

ley to raise me gradually ' ; and then 
have thought again and realized that 
even a pulley 'would give me pain, as 
it would counteract my internal dis- 
position.' Let the world go hang; our 
internal disposition is to stay in bed: 
we cling tenaciously to non-existence 
— or rather, to that third state of con- 
sciousness when we are in the world 
but not of it. 

There are those, no doubt, who will 
say that they have something better to 
do than waste their time wondering 
why they like to stay in bed, which 
they don't. They are persons who 
have never been bored by the mono- 
tony of dressing or have tried to vary 
it, sometimes beginning at one end, 
sometimes at the other, but always de- 
feated by the hard fact that a man can- 
not button his collar until he has put 
on his shirt. If they condescend so far, 

73 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

they will say, with some truth, that it 
is a question of weather, and any fool 
knows that it is not pleasant to get 
out of a warm bed into a cold bedroom. 
The matter has been considered from 
that angle. ' I have been warm all 
night,' wrote Leigh Hunt, 'and find 
myself in a state perfectly suited to a 
warm-blooded animal. To get out of 
this state into the cold, besides the in- 
harmonious and uncritical abruptness 
of the transition, is so unnatural to 
such a creature that the poets, refining 
upon the tortures of the damned, make 
one of their greatest agonies consist in 
being suddenly transported from heat 
to cold — from fire to ice. They are 
"haled" out of their ''beds," says Mil- 
ton, by " harpy- footed furies" — fellows 
who come to call them.' 

But no man, say I, or woman either, 
ever lay in bed and devised logical 

74 



THE LIER IN BED 

reasons for staying there — unless for 
the purposes of an essay, in which case 
the recumbent essayist, snuggle as he 
may, is mentally up and dressed. He is 
really awake. He has tied his necktie. 
He is a busy bee — and I can no more 
imagine a busy bee lying in bed than I 
can imagine lying in bed with one. He 
is no longer in the nice balance between 
sense and oblivion that is too serenely 
and irresponsibly comfortable to be con- 
sciously analyzed; and in which, so long 
as he can stay there without getting 
wider awake, nothing else matters. 

Lying in bed being a half-way house 
between sleeping and waking, and the 
mind then equally indifferent to logic 
and exact realism, the lier in bed can 
and does create his own dreams: it is 
an inexpensive and gentlemanly pleas- 
ure. If his bent is that way, he becomes 
Big Man Me: Fortunatus's purse jingles 

75 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

in his pocket; the slave jumps when he 
rubs the lamp; he excels in all manly 
sports. If you ask with what authority 
I can thus postulate the home-made 
dreams of any lier in bed but myself, 
the answer is easy. It is common knowl- 
edge that the half -awake minds of men 
thus employ themselves, and the fash- 
ion of their employment may be reas- 
onably deduced from observation of 
individuals. The ego even of a modest 
man will be somewhat rampant ; the ego 
of a conceited one would, barring its 
capability for infinite expansion, swell 
up and bust. But this riot of egoism has 
as little relation to the Fine Art of Lying 
in Bed as a movie play has to the fine 
art of the drama. The true artist may 
take fair advantage of his nice state of 
unreason to defy time and space, but 
he will respect essential verities. He 
will treat his ego like the child it is; and, 

76 



THE LIER IN BED 

taking example from a careful mother, 
tie a rope to it when he lets it out to 
play. Thus he will capture a kind of 
immortality; and his lying in bed, a 
transitory state itself, will contradict 
the transitory character of life outside 
of it. Companions he has known and 
loved will come from whatever remote 
places to share these moments, for the 
Fine Art of Lying in Bed consists large- 
ly in cultivating that inward eye with 
which Wordsworth saw the daffodils. 

Whether this can be done on the 
wooden pillow of the Japanese I have 
no way of knowing; but I suspect there 
were some admirable Hers in bed among 
the Roman patricians who were grossly 
accused of effeminacy because they 
slept on feathers. 

The north of China, where bedding 
is laid in winter on raised platforms 
gently heated by little furnaces under- 

77 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

neath, must have produced some highly 
cultivated Hers in bed. The proverbial 
shortness of the German bed (which 
perhaps explains the German Kultur) 
may have tended to discourage the art 
and at the same time unconsciously 
stimulated a hatred of England, where 
the beds are proverbially generous. One 
can at least hope, however, that all beds 
are alike in this matter, provided the 
occupant is a proper lier, who can say 
fairly, — 

My bed has legs 

To run away 
From Here and Now 

And Everyday. 
It trots me off 

From slumber deep 
To the Dear Land 

Of Half-Asleep. 



TO BORE OR NOT TO BORE 

TAKE me away,' said Thomas 
Carlyle, when silence settled for 
a moment over a dinner-table where 
one of the diners had been monologuing 
to the extreme limit of boredom, 'for 
God's sake take me away and put me 
in a room by myself and give me a 
pipe of tobacco ! ' 

Little as we may otherwise resemble 
Carlyle, many of us have felt this emo- 
tion; and som.e realize (although the 
painful suspicion comes from a mind 
too analytical for its own comfort) that 
we may have occasioned it. The nice 
consideration for the happiness of others 
which marks a gentleman may even 
make him particularly susceptible to 
this haunting apprehension. Carlyle 
defined the feeling v/hen he said, 'To 

79 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

sit still and be pumped into is never an 
exhilarating process.' But pumping is 
different. How often have Tmyself , my 
adieus seemingly done, my hat in my 
hand and my feet on the threshold, 
taken a fresh grip, hat or no hat, on the 
pump-handle, and set good-natured, 
Christian folk distressedly wondering 
if I would never stop! And how often 
have I afterward recalled something 
strained and morbidly intent in their 
expressions, a glassiness of the staring 
eye and a starchiness in the smiling lip, 
that has made me suffer under my bed- 
cover and swear that next time I would 
depart like a sky-rocket ! 

Truly it seems surprising, in a for- 
tunate century when the correspon- 
dence school offers so many inexpen- 
sive educational advantages for defi- 
cient adults, that one never sees an 
advertisement — 

80 



TO BORE OR NOT TO BORE 

STOP BEING A BORE! 

If you hore people you can't be loved. 
Don't you want to be loved? Don't YOU? 
Then sign and mail this coupon at once. 
Let Dynamo Doit teach you through his 
famous mail course, How not to be a Bore. 

The explanation, I fancy, must be 
that people who sign and mail coupons 
at once do not know when they are 
bored; that the word 'boredom,' so 
hopelessly heavy with sad significance 
to many of us, is nevertheless but caviar 
to the general and no bait at all for an 
enterprising correspondence school. 

A swift survey of literature, from the 
Old Testament down, yields some strik- 
ing discoveries. To take an example, 
Job does not appear to have regarded 
Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar as bores. 
And there is Bartlett's Familiar Quota- 
tions, out of which one can familiarly 
quote nothing about boredom earlier 

8i 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

than Lord Byron. The subject has ap- 
parently never been studied, and the 
broad division into Bores Positive and 
Bores Negative is so recent that I have 
but this minute made it myself. 

The Bore Positive pumps; the Bore 
Negative compels pumping. Unlike Car- 
lyle, he regards being pumped into as 
an exhilarating process, and so, like the 
Old Man of the Sea on Sinbad's tired 
shoulders, he sits tight and says nothing; 
the difference being that, whereas the 
Old Man kept Sinbad walking, the Bore 
Negative keeps his victim talking. Char- 
lie Wax — who lives down town in the 
shop- window and is always so well- 
dressed — would be a fine Bore Negative 
if one were left alone with him under 
compulsion to keep up a conversation. 

Boredom, in fact, is an acquired dis- 
taste — a by-product of the printing- 
press and steam-engine, which between 

82 



TO BORE OR NOT TO BORE 

them have made and kept mankind 
busier than Solomon in all his wisdom 
could have imagined. Our arboreal an- 
cestor could neither bore nor be bored. 
We see him — with th: mind's eye — 
up there in his tree, poor stupid, his 
think-tank (if the reader will forgive 
me a word which he or she may not 
have quite accepted) practically empty ; 
nothing but a few primal, inarticulate 
thinks at the bottom. It v/ill be a mil- 
lion years or so yet before his progeny 
will say a long farewell to the old home 
in the tree ; and even then they will lack 
words with which to do the occasion 
justice. 

Language, in short, must be invented 
before anybody can be bored with it. 
And I do not believe, although I find it 
stated in a ten-volume Science-His- 
tory of the Universe, that 'language 
is an internal necessity, begotten of a 

83 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

lustful longing to express, through the 
plastic vocal energy, man's secret sense 
of his ability to interpret Nature.' An 
internal necessity, yes — except in the 
case of the Bore Negative, who pre- 
fers to listen; but quite as likely begot- 
ten of man's anything but secret sense 
of his ability to interpret himself. 

Speech grew slowly; and mankind, 
now a speaking animal, had centuries 
— nay, epochs — in which to become 
habituated to the longwindedness that 
Job accepted as a matter of course in 
Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. So that 
even to-day many, like Job, Eliphaz, 
Bildad, and Zophar, bore and are bored 
without really knowing it. 

In the last analysis a bore bores be- 
cause he keeps us from something more 
interesting than himself. He becomes 
a menace to happiness in proportion as 
the span of life is shortened by an in- 

84 



TO BORE OR NOT TO BORE 

creasing number of things to do and 
places to go between crib and coffin. 
Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, full of an 
unusual personal experience that the 
leisurely reader finds most horridly en- 
tertaining, bored the Wedding Guest 
because at that moment the Wedding 
Guest wanted to get to the wedding, 
and was probably restrained from vio- 
lence only by the subconscious thought 
that it is not good form to appear at 
such functions with a missing button. 
But the Mariner was too engrossed in 
his own tale to notice this lack of inter- 
est; and so invariably is the Bore Posi- 
tive : everything escapes him except his 
listener. 

But no matter how well we know 
when we are bored, none of us can be 
certain that he does not sometimes 
bore — not even Tammas. The one 
certainty is that / may bore, and that 

85 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

on the very occasion when I have felt 
myself as entertaining as a three-ring 
circus, I may in effect have been as gay 
and chatty as a like number of tomb- 
stones. There are persons, for that 
matter, who are bored by circuses and 
delighted by tombstones. My mistake 
may have been to put all my conversa- 
tional eggs in one basket — which, in- 
deed, is a very good way to bore people. 
Dynamo Doit, teaching his class of 
industrious correspondents, would prob- 
ably write them, with a picture of him- 
self shaking his fist to emphasize his 
point : ' Do not try to exhaust your sub- 
ject. You will only exhaust your audi- 
ence. Never talk for more than three 
minutes on any topic. Wear a wrist- 
watch and keep your eye on it. If at the 
end of three minutes you cannot change 
the subject, tell one of the following 
anecdotes.' And I am quite sure also 

86 



TO BORE OR NOT TO BORE 

that Professor Doit would write to his 
class: 'Whatever topic you discuss, 
discuss it originally. Be apt. Be bright. 
Be pertinent. Be yourself. Remember 
always that it is not so much what you 
say as the way you say it that will charm 
your listener. Think clearly. Illustrate 
and drive home your meaning with il- 
luminating figures — the sort of thing 
that your hearer will remember and 
pass on to others as ''another of So-and- 
so's hon-mots.'" Here you will find that 
reading the "Wit and Humor" column 
in newspapers and magazines is a great 
help. And speak plainly. Remember 
that unless you are heard you cannot 
expect to interest. On this point, dear 
student, I can do no better than repeat 
Lord Chesterfield's advice to his son: 
"Read what Cicero and Quintilian say 
of enunciation." ' 

But perhaps, after all, enunciation is 
87 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

no more important than renunciation; 
and the first virtue that we who do not 
wish to be bores must practise is ab- 
stemiousness of self. I know it is hard, 
but I do not mean total abstinence. A 
man who tried to converse without his 
Fs would make but a blind stagger at 
it. This short and handsome word (as 
Colonel Roosevelt might have said) is 
not to be utterly discarded without 
danger of such a silence as would trans- 
form the experimenter into a Bore 
Negative of the most negative descrip- 
tion. Practically deprived of speech, 
he would become like a Charlie Wax 
endowed with locomotion and provided 
with letters of introduction. But one 
can at least curb the pronoun, and, with 
shrewd covert glances at his wrist- 
watch, confine the personally conducted 
tour into and about Myself within rea- 
sonable limits. Let him say bravely in 

88 



TO BORE OR NOT TO BORE 

the beginning, * I will not talk about 
Myself for more than thirty minutes by 
my wrist- watch' ; then reduce it to 
twenty-five ; then to twenty — and so 
on to the irreducible minimum; and he 
will be surprised to feel how his popular- 
ity increases with leaps and bounds at 
each reduction — provided, of course, 
that he finds anything else to talk about. 
Your Complete Bore, however, is in- 
capable of this treatment, for he does 
not know that he is a bore. It is only 
the Occasional Bore, a sensitive, well- 
meaning fellow who would not harm 
anybody, whose head lies sleepless on a 
pillow hot with his blushes while he goes 
over and over so apt and tripping a dia- 
logue that it would withhold Gabriel 
from blowing his trumpet. So it seems 
to him in his bed; but alas, these dia- 
logues are never of any practical use. 
They comfort, but they do not cure. 

89 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

For no person ever talks to us as we 
talk to ourselves. The better way is to 
decide firmly (i) to get a wrist- watch, 
and (2) to get to sleep. 

There is, however, one infallible rule 
for not being a bore, — or at any rate 
for not being much of a bore, — and that 
is, never to make a call, or talk to one 
person, or to several at once, for more 
than fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes 
is not really a very long time, although 
it may seem so. But to apply this rule 
successfully one must become adept in 
the Fine Art of Going Away. Resting 
your left hand negligently on your 
right knee, so that the wrist protrudes 
with an effect of careless grace from the 
cuff, you have glanced at your watch 
and observed that the fifteen minutes 
are up. You get up yourself. Others 
get up — or, if there is but one other, 
she. So far, so good. But now that 

90 



TO BORE OR NOT TO BORE 

everybody is up, new subjects of con- 
versation, as if catching this rising in- 
fection, come up also. You are in a 
position in which, except by rather too 
oratorical or dramatic a gesture, you 
cannot look at your watch; more than 
that, if you bore a person sitting down 
and wondering when you are going to 
get up, you bore far worse a person 
standing up and wondering when you 
will go away. That you have in effect 
started to go away — and not gone 
away — and yet must go away some 
time — and may go away at any minute : 
this consciousness, to a person stand- 
ing first on one tired foot and then on 
the other, rapidly becomes almost, but 
never quite, unendurable. Reason tot- 
ters, but remains on the throne. One 
can almost lay down a law: Two per- 
sons who do not part with kisses should 
part with haste. 

91 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

The way to do is to go like the sky- 
rocket — up and out. 

But the fifteen-minute call followed 
by the flying exit is at best only a nig- 
gling and unsatisfactory solution; it is 
next door to always staying at home. 
Then certainly you would never be a 
bore (except to the family) ; but neither 
by any possibility could you ever be 
that most desirable factor in life, the 
Not-Bore. The Hermit is a slacker. 
Better far to come out of your cave, 
mingle, bore as little as may be — and 
thank Heaven that here and there you 
meet one whom you somehow feel rea- 
sonably certain that you do not bore. 



WHERE TOILS THE TAILOR 

OF the several places in which a 
man waits to have something 
done to him, no other is so restful as the 
establishment of his tailor. His doctor 
and his dentist do their best with invit- 
ing chairs and a pile of magazines on the 
table : one gets an impression that both 
of them were once liberal subscribers to 
the current periodicals, but stopped a 
year or two ago and have never bought 
a magazine since. But these, in their 
official capacity, are painful gentlemen ; 
and a long procession of preceding pa- 
tients have imparted to the atmosphere 
of their waiting-rooms a heavy sense of 
impending misery. 

The tailor is different. 'There was 
peace,' wrote Meredith, 'in Mr. Goren's 
shop. Badgered ministers, bankrupt 

93 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

merchants, diplomatists with a head- 
ache, — any of our modern grandees 
under difficulties, — might have envied 
that peace over which Mr. Goren pre- 
sided : and he was an enviable man. He 
loved his craft, he believed he had not 
succeeded the millions of antecedent 
tailors in vain.' 

And so it is, I dare say, in varying 
degree with all tailors; or at any rate 
should be, for tailor and customer meet 
on the pleasantest imaginable plane of 
congenial interest. A person whose chief 
desire in life at the moment is to be 
becomingly dressed comes to one whose 
chief ambition in life at the moment is 
to becomingly dress him. No hideous 
and insistent apprehension preys on 
the mind of the waiting customer; for 
the tailor's worst tool is a tape-measure, 
and his worst discovery may be that 
the customer is growing fat. One waits, 

94 



WHERE TOILS THE TAILOR 

indeed, without serious apprehension, 
at the barber's; but here the company 
is mixed and the knowledge inescapable 
that it will look on with idle interest 
while he cuts your hair or covers your 
honest face with lather. Only the harm- 
less necessary assistant will see you 
measured, and he, by long practise, has 
acquired an air of remoteness and in- 
difference that makes him next thing to 
invisible. So complete indeed is this 
tactful abstraction that one might im- 
agine him a man newly fallen in love. 
I have seen it stated, though I cannot 
remember just where, that the Old 
Testament makes no mention of the 
tailor ; the Book, however, shows plainly 
that Solomon was not only a sage but 
also a best-dresser, and it stands to 
reason that his wives did not make his 
clothes. One wife might have done it, 
but not three hundred. A tailor came 

95 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

at intervals to the palace, and then 
went back to where, somewhere in the 
business section of the ancient city, 
there was doubtless a tablet with a 
cuneiform inscription: — 

3J am l)t tijat makes; tfje 
(^lorp of Solomon : pea, 
tije iWafeer of tfje Wipptv 
anb tfje ^etljer <§lorp. 

The Smart Set of Solomon's day patron- 
ized him, yet he remained, quite natu- 
rally, beneath the notice of the Old Tes- 
tament writers — unfashionable men, 
one may readily believe, living at a 
convenient period when a garment very 
much like our own bath-robe answered 
their own purposes, and could probably 
be bought ready-to-wear. 

But one can no more think of a full- 
blown civilization without tailors than 
one can imagine a complex state of 

96 



WHERE TOILS THE TAILOR 

society in which, for example, the con- 
temporary Saturday Evening Post would 
publish its Exclusive Saturday Evening 
Styles, and gentlemen would habitually 
buy their patterns by bust-measure and 
cut out their new suits at home on the 
dining-room table. The idea may seem 
practical, but the bust with men is 
evidently not a reliable guide to all the 
other anatomical proportions. Nor, 
again, however little the Old Testament 
concerns itself with tailors, did it fail to 
mention the first of them. The line 
goes back to Adam, cross-legged under 
the Tree, — the first tailor and the 
first customer together, — companioned, 
pleasantly enough, by the first 'little 
dressmaker.' They made their clothes 
together, and made them alike — an 
impressive, beautiful symbol of the per- 
fect harmony between the sexes that the 
world lost and is now slowly regaining. 

97 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

Times have changed since Adam : the 
apron of his honest anxious handicraft 
— for it was the penalty of his sin that 
he would never be happy until he got it 
finished and put it on — has undergone 
many changes, in the course of which 
even its evolution into Plymouth Rock 
Pants, yes even those once seemingly 
eternal lines, — 

When the pant-hunter pantless 
Is panting for pants, — 

are now fading from human memory; 
yet until within the past few decades a 
gentleman had a tailor as inexorably as 
he had a nose. But now the immemo- 
rial visit to his tailor is no longer abso- 
lutely necessary. He may, if such is his 
inclination, — as I am sure it would 
have been Adam's, — get his new suit 
all finished and ready-to-wear. Charley 
Wax, the sartorially Perfect Gentleman, 
smiles invitation and encouragement 

98 



WHERE TOILS THE TAILOR 

from many a window; an army of ele- 
gant and expeditious employees, each 
as much like Charley Wax as is humanly 
possible, waits to conduct him to a mil- 
lion ready-to-wear suits. His intellect 
is appealed to by the plausible argument 
that we live in a busy time, in which the 
leaders of men simply cannot afford to 
waste their valuable hours by going to 
the tailor: at the ready-to-wear em- 
porium you simply pay your money and 
take your choice. 

Many a gentleman, suddenly discov- 
ering that he is a 'leader of men,' has 
deserted his tailor: many a gentleman, 
learning by experience that it takes as 
long to try on clothes in one place as 
another, has presently gone back to 
him. Starting with the democratic 
premise that all men are born equal, 
the ready-to-wear clothier proceeds on 
the further assumption that each man 

99 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

becomes in time either short, stout, or 
medium; and this amendment to the 
Declaration of Independence has in- 
deed created a new repubHc of shorts, 
stouts, and mediums, in which Charley 
Wax is the perpetual president. Here, 
indeed, would seem to be a step toward 
patterns for gentlemen: one sees the 
gentleman in imagination happily cut- 
ting out his new spring suit on the din- 
ing-room table, or sitting cross-legged 
on that centre of domestic hospitality, 
while he hums a little tune to himself 
and merrily sews the sections together. 
But unfortunately the shorts, stouts, 
and mediums are not respectively stand- 
ard according to bust-measure. A gen- 
tleman, for example, may simultane- 
ously be short in the legs, medium in 
the chest, and stout in the circumfer- 
ence: the secret of the ready-to-wear 
clothier lies in his ability to meet on the 

100 



WHERE TOILS THE TAILOR 

spot conditions which no single pattern 
could hope to anticipate. We must go 
back toward nature, and stop short at 
Adam, to find a costume that any 
gentleman can successfully make for 
himself. 

Personally I prefer the immemorial 
visit to the tailor; I like this restful at- 
mosphere, in which unborn suits of 
clothes contentedly await creation in 
rolls of cloth, and the styles of the 
season are exhibited by pictures of 
gentlemen whose completely vacuous 
countenances comfortably repudiate the 
desirability of being 'leaders of men.* 
On the table the Geographical Magazine 
invites to unexciting wonder at the way 
other people dress. From the next room 
one hears the voice of the tailor, leisure- 
ly reporting to his assistant as he tape- 
measures a customer. In the lineage of 
a vocation it is odd to think that his 

lOI 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

great-great-great grandfather might 

have sat cross-legged to inspire the poem 

A carrion crow sat on an oak 
Watching a tailor shape a coat. 

'Wife, bring me my old bent bow 
That I may shoot yon carrion crow.' 

The tailor shot, and he missed the mark, 
And shot the miller's sow through the heart. 

'Wife, O, wife, bring brandy in a spoon, 
For the old miller's sow is in a swoon.* 

The quick and unexpected tragedy (for 
the sow) etches the old-time tailor at 
his work: one gets, as it were, a crow's- 
eye view of him. Such, I imagine, was 
his universal aspect, cross-legged on a 
bench in his little stall or beside his 
open window, more skilled with shears 
and needle than with lethal weapon, 
despite the gallant brigade of tailors 
who went to battle under the banner of 
Queen Elizabeth. Yet I cannot imagine 
my own tailor sitting cross-legged beside 
an open window; nor, for that matter, 

102 



WHERE TOILS THE TAILOR 

sitting cross-legged anywhere, except 
perhaps on the sands of the sea in his 
proper bathing-suit. His genealogy be- 
gins with those 'taylours' who, in the 
nineteenth year of Henry VII, 'sewyd 
the Kynge to be callyd Marchante Tay- 
lours ' — evidently earning the disfavor 
of their neighbors, for a 'grete grudge 
rose among dyuers other craftys in the 
cyte against them.' Very soon, I fancy, 
these Marchante Taylours began to 
pride themselves on the straightness of 
their legs, and let subordinate crafts- 
men stretch their sartorious muscles. 
But why, as Carlyle puts it, the idea 
had 'gone abroad, and fixed itself 
down in a wide-spreading rooted error, 
that Tailors are a distinct species in 
Physiology, not Men, but fractional 
Parts of a Man,' nobody has yet ex- 
plained satisfactorily. 

So one muses, comfortably awaiting 
103 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

the tailor, while the eye travels through 
far countries, glimpsing now and then 
a graceful figure that somehow reminds 
one of a darker complexioned Septem- 
ber Morn, and helps perhaps to explain 
the wide-spread popularity of a maga- 
zine whose title seems at first thought 
to limit it to a public-school circulation. 
And yet, strangely enough, there are 
men whose wives find it difftcult to per- 
suade them to go to the tailor; or, for 
that matter to the ready-to-wear cloth- 
ier. There is, after all, something undig- 
nified in standing on a little stool and 
being measured ; nor is it a satisfactory 
substitute for this procedure to put on 
strange garments in a little closet and 
come forth to pose before mirrors under 
the critical eye of a living Charley Wax. 
Fortunately the tailor and the polite and 
expeditious salesman of the ready-to- 
wear emporium have this in common: 

104 



WHERE TOILS THE TAILOR 

art or nature has in both cases produced 
a man seemingly with no sense of humor. 
Fortunately, too, in both cases a gentle- 
man goes alone to acquire a new suit. 
I have seen it suggested in the adver- 
tising column of the magazine that a 
young man should bring his fiancee 
with him, to help select his ready-to-wear 
garments; but the idea emanates from 
the imagination of an ad-writer, and I 
am sure that nobody concerned, except 
perhaps the fiancee, would welcome it 
in actual practice. Wives indeed, and 
maybe fiancees, sometimes accompany 
those they love when a hat is to be tried 
on and purchased ; but I have been told 
in bitter confidence by a polite hatter 
that 't is a custom more honored in the 
breach than in the observance ; and this 
I think is sufficient reason why it should 
not be extended, so to speak, to the 
breeches. 



SHAVING THOUGHTS 

TALKING of shaving the other 
night at Dr. Taylor's,' wrote the 
biographer Boswell, ' Dr. Johnson said, 
"Sir, of a thousand shavers, two do not 
shave so much alike as not to be distin- 
guished." I thought this not possible, 
till he specified so many of the varieties 
in shaving, — holding the razor more or 
lessperpendicular; drawing long or short 
strokes; beginning at the upper part of 
the face, or the under; at the right side 
or the left side. Indeed, when one con- 
siders what variety of sounds can be ut- 
tered by the windpipe, in the compass 
of a very small aperture, we may be 
convinced how many degrees of differ- 
ence there may be in the application of 
the razor.' 

So they talked of shaving at Dr. Tay- 
io6 



SHAVING THOUGHTS 

lor's before the advent of the safety- 
razor; and our curiosity can never be 
satisfied as to just what so acute an 
observer as Dr. Johnson would have 
thought of this characteristically mod- 
ern invention to combine speed and 
convenience. I can imagine Boswell 
playfully reminding the doctor how 
that illustrious friend had quite recent- 
ly expressed his disapproval of bleed- 
ing. 'Sir,' says Samuel, as he actually 
did on another occasion, 'courage is a 
quality necessary for maintaining vir- 
tue.' And he adds (blowing with high 
derision), 'Poh! If a man is to be in- 
timidated by the possible contempla- 
tion of his own blood — let him grow 
whiskers.' At any rate among a thou- 
sand shavers to-day, two do not think 
so much alike that one may not be in- 
fluenced by this consideration, and re- 
gard Byron, composing his verses while 

107 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

shaving, as a braver poet than if he had 
performed the operation with a safety. 
The world of shavers is divided in- 
to three classes: the ordinary shaver, 
the safety shaver, and the extraordi- 
nary-safety shaver, who buys each safe- 
ty razor as soon as it is invented and 
is never so happy as when about to try 
a new one. To a shaver of this class, 
cost is immaterial. A safety-razor for 
a cent, with twenty gold-monogramed 
blades and a guaranty of expert surgi- 
cal attendance if he cuts himself, would 
stir his active interest neither more nor 
less than a safety-razor for a hundred 
dollars, with one CannotbeduU blade 
and an iron-clad agreement to pay the 
makers an indemnity if he found it un- 
satisfactory. He buys them secretly, 
lest his wife justly accuse him of extrav- 
agance, and practises cunning in get- 
ting rid of them afterward ; for to a con- 

io8 



SHAVING THOUGHTS 

scientious gentleman throwing away a 
razor is a responsible matter. It is hard 
to think of any place where a razor- 
blade, indestructible and horribly sharp 
as it is, — for all purposes except shav- 
ing, — can be thrown away without 
some worry over possible consequences. 
A baby may find and swallow it; the 
ashman sever an artery; dropping it 
overboard at sea is impracticable, to say 
nothing of the danger to some innocent 
fish. Mailing it anonymously to the 
makers, although it is expensive, is a 
solution, or at least shifts the respon- 
sibility. Perhaps the safest course is 
to put the blades with the odds and 
ends you have been going to throw 
away to-morrow ever since you can 
remember; for there, while you live, 
nobody will ever disturb them. Once, 
indeed, I — but this is getting too per- 
sonal: I was simply about to say that 

109 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

it is possible to purchase a twenty-five 
cent safety-razor, returnable if unsat- 
isfactory, and find the place of sale 
vanished before you can get back to 
it. But between inventions in safety- 
razors, the extraordinary-safety shaver 
is likely to revert to first principles and 
the naked steel of his ancestors. 

And as he shaves he will perhaps 
think sometimes of the unhappy Ed- 
ward II of England, who, before his 
fall, wore his beard in three corkscrew 
curls — and was shaved afterward by 
a cruel jailer who had it done with cold 
water! The fallen monarch wept with 
discomfort and indignation. 'Here at 
least,' he exclaimed reproachfully, *is 
warm water on my cheeks, whether you 
will or no.' But the heartless shave 
proceeded. Razed away were those 
corkscrew curls from the royal chin, 
and so he comes down to us without 

no 



SHAVING THOUGHTS 

them, shaved as well as bathed in tears 
— one of the most pitiful figures in 
history. 

Personally, however, I prefer to think 
of kindlier scenes while shaving. Noth- 
ing that I can do now can help poor 
Edward: no indignation of mine can 
warm that cold water; perhaps, after 
all, the cruel jailer had a natural and 
excusable hatred of corkscrew curls any- 
where. I should feel quite differently 
about it if he had warmed the water; 
but although a man may shave himself 
with cold water, certainly nobody else 
has a right to. 

There have been periods in the his- 
tory of man when I, too, would prob- 
ably have cultivated some form of 
whiskering. Perhaps, like Mr. Richard 
Shute, I would have kept a gentleman 
(reduced) to read aloud to me while my 
valet starched and curled my whiskers 

III 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

— such being the mode in the seven- 
teenth century when Mr. Shute was 
what they then called, without meaning 
offense, a turkey merchant; and indeed 
his pride in his whiskers was nothing out 
of the common. Or, being less able to 
support a valet to starch and curl, and 
a gentleman to read aloud 'on some 
useful subject,' — poor gentleman! I 
hope that he and Mr. Shute agreed as 
to what subjects were useful, but I 
have a feeling they did n't, — I might 
have had to economize, and might 
have been one of those who were 'so 
curious in the management of their 
beards that they had pasteboard cases 
to put over them at night, lest they 
turn upon them and rumple them in 
their sleep.' 

Nevertheless, wives continued to re- 
spect their husbands in about the nor- 
mal proportion. Within the relatively 

112 



SHAVING THOUGHTS 

brief compass of the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries, I, who would have gone 
smooth-shaven in the fourteenth, could 
conceivably have fluttered in at least 
thirty-eight separate and beautiful ar- 
rangements of moustaches, beard, and 
whiskers. Nor, I suspect, did these ar- 
rangements always wait upon the slow 
processes of nature. One does not have 
to grow whiskers. Napoleon's youthful 
oflicers were fiercely bewhiskered, but 
often with the aid of helpfully adhe- 
sive gum; and in the eighteen-thirties 
there occurs in the Boston Transcript^ 
as a matter of course, an advertisement 
of 'gentlemen's whiskers ready-made 
or to order.' We see in imagination a 
quiet corner at the whisker's, with a 
mirror before which the Bostonian tries 
on his ready-made whiskers before or- 
dering them sent home; or again, the 
Bostonian in doubt, selecting now this 

113 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

whisker, now that from the Gentlemen's 
Own Whisker Book, and still with a shade 
of indecision on hh handsome face as 
he holds it up t' be measured. 'Per- 
haps, after all, those other whiskers — ' 

But the brisk, courteous person with 
the dividers and Vape-measure is reas- 
suring. 'Elegant whiskers!' he repeats 
at intervals. 'They will do us both 
credit.' 

The matter has, in fact, been intelli- 
gently studied ; the beautifying effect of 
whiskers reduced to principles. If my 
face is too wide, a beard lengthens it; 
if my face is too narrow, it expands as 
if by magic with the addition of what 
have sometimes been affectionately 
called 'mutton chops,' or 'siders' ; if my 
nose projects, almost like a nose trying 
to escape from a face to which it has 
been sentenced for life, a pair of large, 
handsome moustaches will provide a 

114 



SHAVING THOUGHTS 

proper entourage — a nest, so to speak, 
on which the nose rests contentedly, 
almost like a setting hen; if my nose 
retreats backward "iiito my face, the 
aesthetic solution is o'iviously gal ways. 
A stout gentleman can do wonders with 
his appearance by adopting a pointed 
beard, and a suit of clothes, shirt, 
necktie, and stockings with pronounced 
vertical stripes. A thin one, on the 
other hand; becomes at once substan- 
tial in effect, without being gross, if 
he cultivates side- whiskers, and wears 
a suit of clothes, shirt, cravat, and 
stockings with pronounced horizon- 
tal stripes. If my face lacks fierceness 
and dynamic force, it needs a brisk, 
arrogant moustache; or if it has too 
much of these qualities, a long, sad, 
drooping moustache will counterbal- 
ance them. I read in my volume of 
Romantic Love and Personal Beauty 

115 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

that * the movements of the moustache 
are dependent on the muscle called de- 
pressor alcB nasi. By specially cultiva- 
ting this muscle, men might in course of 
time make the movements of the mous- 
tache subject to voluntary control.' 

Just think what a capacity for emo- 
tional expression lies in such a simple 
organ as the dog's caudal appendage, 
aptly called the ' psychographic tail ' by 
Vischer; and moustaches are double, 
and therefore equal to two psycho- 
graphic appendages! Truly I know 
not of which to think first — a happy 
gentleman wagging his moustache or a 
happy dog wagging two tails. And yet 
here am I , shaving away the daily effort 
of this double psychographic appendage 
to become visible! One might almost 
think that my depressor alee nasi was a 
vermiform appendix. 

It has been said by some critics that 
ii6 



SHAVING THOUGHTS 

whiskers are a disguise. I should be un- 
willing to commit myself to this belief; 
nor can I accept the contrary conviction 
that whiskers are a gift of Almighty 
Providence in which the Giver is so sen- 
sitively interested that to shave them 
off is to invite eternal punishment of 
a kind — and this, I think, destroys the 
theory — that would singe them off in 
about two seconds. Vv^hiskers are real, 
and sometimes uncomfortably earnest; 
the belief that they betoken an almost 
brutal masculine force is visible in this, 
that those whose whiskers are naturally 
thinnest take the greatest satisfaction 
in possessing them — seem, in fact, to 
say proudly, ' These are my whiskers ! ' 
But I cannot feel that a gentleman is 
any more disguised by his whiskers, 
real, ready-made, or made to order, 
than he would be if he appeared naked 
or in a ready-made or made-to-order 

117 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

suit. Whiskers, in fact, are a subtle rev- 
elation of real character, whether the 
kind that exist as a soft, mysterious 
haze about the lower features or such 
as inspired the immortal limerick, — I 
quote from memory, — 

There was an old man with a beard 
Who said, 'I am greatly afeard 

Two larks and a hen, 

A jay and a wren, 
Have each made a nest in my beard. 

Yet I feel also, and strongly, that the 
man who shaves clean stands, as it 
were, on his own face. 

We have, indeed, but to visualize 
clearly the spectacle of a gentleman 
shaving himself and put beside it the 
spectacle of a gentleman starching and 
curling his whiskers, to see the finer 
personal dignity that has come with the 
general adoption of the razor. I am not 
going to attempt to describe a gentle- 

ii8 



SHAVING THOUGHTS 

man starching and curling his whiskers, 
— it would be too horrible, — but I like 
to dwell on the shaver. He whistles or 
perhaps hums. He draws hot water 
from the faucet — Alas, poor Edward ! 
He makes a rich, creamy lather either 
in a mug or (for the sake of literary 
directness) on his own with a shaving- 
stick. He strops his razor, or perhaps 
selects a blade already sharpened for 
his convenience. He rubs in the lather. 
He shaves, and, as Dr. Johnson so 
shrewdly pointed out that night at Dr. 
Taylor's, 'Sir, of a thousand shavers, 
two do not shave so much alike as not 
to be distinguished.' Perhaps he cuts 
himself, for a clever man at self-muti- 
lation can do it, even with a safety; 
but who cares? Come, Little Alum, the 
shaver's friend, smartly to the rescue! 
And then, he exercises the shaver's 
prerogative and powders his face. 

119 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

Fortunately the process does not al- 
ways go so smoothly. There are times 
when the Local Brotherhood of Razors 
have gone on strike and refuse to be 
stropped. There are times at which the 
twelve interchangeable blades are hard- 
ly better for shaving than twelve inter- 
changeable postage-stamps. There are 
times when the lather might have been 
fairly guaranteed to dry on the face. 
There are times when Little Alum, the 
shaver's friend, might well feel the 
sting of his own powerlessness. But 
these times are the blessed cause of 
genial satisfaction when everything 
goes happily. 

Truly it is worth while to grow a 
beard — for the sake of shaving it off. 
Not such a beard as one might starch 
and curl — but the beginnings — an ob- 
fuscation of the chin, cheeks, and upper 
lip — a horror of unseemly growth — a 

120 



SHAVING THOUGHTS 

landscape of the face comparable to 

that ominous tract which, all agree, 
Hides the Dark Tower 

in Browning's grim poem of 'Childe 
Roland.' Then is the time to strop 
your favorite razor! I wonder, while 
stropping mine, if any man still lives 
who uses a moustache cup? 



OH, THE AFTERNOON TEA! 

ANY man who knows that, sooner 
or later, he must go to another 
afternoon tea cannot but rejoice at the 
recent invention of an oval, platter-like 
saucer, large enough to hold with ease a 
cup, a lettuce or other sandwich, and a 
dainty trifle of pastry. The thing was 
needed : the modesty of the anonymous 
inventor — evidently not Mr. Edison 
— reveals him one of the large body 
of occasional and unwilling tea-goers. 
We, the reluctant and unwilling, are all 
strangely alike at these functions; and 
we have all been embarrassed by the 
old-fashioned saucer. Circular in shape, 
and hardly larger than the cup that be- 
lies its reputation and dances drunken- 
ly whenever another guest joggles our 
elbow, — which happens so often that 

122 



OH, THE AFTERNOON TEA! 

we suspect conspiracy, — the old-fash- 
ioned saucer affords no reasonably se- 
cure perch for a sandwich; responds 
with delight to the law of gravitation 
if left to itself; and sets us wishing, 
those of us who think scientifically, 
that evolution had refrained from do- 
ing away with an extension by which 
alone we could now hope to manage it. 
We mean a tail! If afternoon teas had 
been started in the Oligocene Epoch 
instead of the seventeenth century, we 
are convinced that evolution, far from 
discarding this useful appendage, would 
have perfected it. A little hand would 
have evolved at the end of it — such 
a one as might hold a Perfect Gentle- 
man's saucer while he sipped from his 
tea-cup. 

Nay, more. In many ways that will 
at once occur to the intelligent reader 
this little hand would be helpful in our 

123 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

complex modern civilization. It would 
hold this essay. It would turn the 
music at the piano. It would enable 
two well-disposed persons cordially to 
shake hands when their four other 
hands were busy with bundles. It 
would slap the coward mosquito that 
stabs in the back. It would be abso- 
lutely perfect for waving farewell. Nor 
would there be anything 'funny' about 
it, or shocking to the most refined sensi- 
bilities : the vulgar would laugh and the 
refined would hide a shudder at the 
sight of a man with no tail ! We would, 
of course, all look like the Devil, but 
everybody knows that his tail has never 
yet kept him out of polite society. 

This digression, however, leads us 
away from our subject into alien re- 
grets. We put it behind us. 

The truth is, we do not like your 
afternoon teas — except those little 

124 



OH, THE AFTERNOON TEA! 

ones, like the nice children of an ob- 
jectionable mother, that are informal, 
intimate, and not destructive of our 
identity. At larger gatherings we have 
no identity: we are supernumeraries, 
mere tea-cup bearers, wooden Indians 
who have been through Hampton, hand- 
carved gentlemen, automaton tea-goers. 
In short, we are so many lay figures, 
each with a tea-cup in one hand and 
food in the other ; we know that we are 
smiling because we can feel it; we remain 
where we are laid until forcibly moved to 
another spot, and we are capable, under 
pressure, of emitting a few set phrases 
that resemble human speech. 

Yet within this odd simulacrum of a 
worldly, entertaining, and interested 
gentleman, a living mind surveys the 
gay scene with a strange, emotionless 
detachment — just so, perhaps, will it 
eventually survive the body. We are 

125 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

really alive, conscious that we dislike 
change, nervous when moved and stood 
up in another place, and intellectually 
certain that no real harm can come to us. 
One is reminded of Seneca's observation : 
Vere magnum ^ habere fragilitatem hom- 
inis, securitatem del. There is about 
us something of the frailty of a man, 
something of the security of a god ; the 
pity of it is that we cannot follow Sen- 
eca to his conclusion and comfort our- 
selves with the thought that we are 
'truly great.' 

I have often wondered, while 'doll- 
ing up,' as the strikingly appropriate 
modernism puts it, for such a function, 
whether there is any universal reason 
why a reluctant man should go to an 
afternoon tea. There are, of course, 
many individual reasons, more or less 
important to the individual tea-goer; 
but for us the impulsion comes inev- 

126 



OH, THE AFTERNOON TEA! 

itably from without. The verb 'drag,* 
often appHed to the process by which 
a man is brought to a tea, indicates how 
valuable would be the discovery of a 
Universal Reason wherefore any man 
might hope to derive some personal 
good from this inescapable experience. 

An excellent place for the thinker to 
examine this problem is in his bath-tub 
preparatory to dolling up. He is alone 
and safe from interruption, unless he 
has forgotten to lock the door ; his mem- 
ory and observation of afternoon teas 
past is stimulated by afternoon tea to 
come; and he is himself more like the 
Universal Man than on most other 
occasions. Featherless biped mammals 
that we are, what need have we in 
common that might conceivably pro- 
vide a good and sufficient reason for 
the dolling up to which I am about 
to subject myself? Substantial food, 

127 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

less fleeting, however, than a lettuce or 
other sandwich and a dainty trifle of 
pastry; protective clothing; a house, 
or even a cave, to shelter us in cold 
or stormy weather — these, evidently, 
are clearly apprehended necessities, and 
we will march on the soles of our feet, 
like the plantigrade creatures we are, 
wherever such goods are obtainable. 

If all men were hungry, naked, and 
homeless, and the afternoon tea pro- 
vided food, clothes, and a home, any 
man would jump at an invitation. But 
there are other necessities of living — 
and here, too, I in my porcelain dish 
am one with Christopher Columbus, 
Lord Chesterfield, Chang the Chinese 
Giant, the Editor of the Atlantic, and the 
humblest illiterate who never heard of 
him — of which we are not so vividly 
conscious. Yet we seek them instinc- 
tively, each in his own manner and de- 

128 



OH, THE AFTERNOON TEA! 

gree — amusement, useful experience, 
friends, and his own soul. So I read and 
accept Tagore when he says, 'Man's 
history is the history of man's journey 
to the unknown in quest of his immortal 
self — his soul.' Willy-nilly, even hig- 
glety-pigglety and helter-skelter, these 
are what the featherless biped is after. 
As for useful experience, this after- 
noon tea reminds me of those lower 
social gatherings where liquor is, or used 
to be, sold only to be drunk on the prem- 
ises. Granting that I become a finished 
tea-goer, easy of speech, nodding, laugh- 
ing, secure in the graceful manipula- 
tion of my tea-things, never upsetting 
my tea, never putting my sandwich in 
the way of an articulating tongue, yet 
is all this experience of no use whatever 
to me except at other afternoon teas. I 
go to school simply to learn how to go 
to school. The most finished and com- 

129 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

plete tea-goer, if he behaves anywhere 
else as he does at an afternoon tea, 
creates more widely the same unfavor- 
able impression that he creates, in his 
own proper sphere, on me. Can I then 
reasonably regard experience as useful 
which I observe to be useful only for 
doing something which I observe to be 
useless? The soap agrees that I cannot. 
Yet, says the sponge, if I might hope 
at some afternoon tea to discover my 
immortal soul, the case would be differ- 
ent; this experience would be valuable. 
O foolish sponge! I am compelled to 
tell you that at afternoon teas it is es- 
pecially difficult for a mortal gentleman 
to believe that he has any immortal soul 
to look for. It is a gathering essentially 
mundane and ephemeral. For it we put 
on our most worldly garments. For it 
we practise our most worldly smirks in 
dumb rehearsal before our mirror and 

130 



OH, THE AFTERNOON TEA! 

an audience of one silly, attentive im- 
age, thinking that this time, this time 
— But it is always the same: the ob- 
servant mind in the immovable body. 
As for the immortal soul, O sponge! it 
may, and doubtless does, go to strange 
places — but it cannot he dragged. 

And so we come to the final question : 
is the afternoon tea a place where one 
featherless, plantigrade, biped mammal 
of the genus Homo may meet another 
whom he might hope some time to call 
a friend? I do not mean 'my friend 
What's-his-name?' but rather such an- 
other biped as Tennyson had in mind 
when he wrote, — 

Since we deserved the name of friends 
And thine effect so lives in me, 
A part of mine may live in thee 

And move thee on to noble ends. 

I grant you, peering out of my tub at 
the world, that there are many to whom 

131 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

this thought sounds sublimated and ex- 
travagant : a poet says this sort of thing 
because such is his poetic business. We 
come nearer perhaps to the universal 
understanding in John Hay's definition 
that ' Friends are the sunshine of life ' ; 
for it is equally true that all men seek 
sunlight and that every man seeks a 
friend after his own kind and nature. 
The best and most intelligent of us ad- 
mit the rarity and value of friendship; 
the worst and most ignorant of us are 
unwittingly the better for knowing some 
friendly companion. But these after- 
noon teas are inimical to friendship; 
and the first duty of a hostess is to sep- 
arate, expeditiously and without hope 
of again coming together, any other two 
guests who appear to be getting ac- 
quainted. On this count, even were 
we not Automaton Tea-Goers, debarred 
by inherent stability from any normal 

132 



OH, THE AFTERNOON TEA! 

human intercourse, the afternoon tea 
must prove more disheartening than 
helpful. We might at best glimpse a 
potential friend as the desert islander 
sights a passing sail on the far horizon. 

There is, alas, no Universal Reason 
why a man should go to an afternoon tea ! 

So the matter looks to me in my tub, 
but perhaps, like Diogenes, I am a cyn- 
ic philosopher. After all, when a thing 
cannot be escaped, why seek for reasons 
not to escape it? Let us, rather, be 
brave if we cannot be gay; cheerful if 
we cannot talk ; ornamental if we cannot 
move. As the grave-digger in Elsinore 
churchyard might say : ' Here lies the 
afternoon tea; good: here stands the 
gentleman; good: If the gentleman go 
to this afternoon tea and bore himself, 
it is, will he, nill he, he goes, — mark 
you that? But if the afternoon tea come 
to him and bore him, he bores not him- 

133 



THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN 

self; argal, he that goes not wilHngly to 
the afternoon tea wearies not his own 
life.' 

So, in effect, he that is dragged to an 
afternoon tea does not go at all; and 
when he gets there, he is really some- 
where else. This happy thought is a 
little difficult to reconcile with circum- 
stances; but when one has becom.e 
thoroughly soaked in it, it is a great 
help. 



The End 



